Yearly Archives: 2013

When I teach workshops or lead discussions on coming off psychiatric drugs and alternatives, there are invariably parents present who are at loose ends. They want to know what to do for their children, how to help them best, and how it can be possible for their child to live without medication given all they have been through.

We are constantly hearing that ‘how we eat’ affects our health. The vast majority of studies showing the associations between diet and mental health have emerged in only the last decade, at best. So any professional who graduated over 10 years ago could potentially be completely unfamiliar with this body of research. We are encouraged by the number of professionals starting to pay attention to diet, but we have a long way to go.

We’re in scary times. For so many reasons. Perhaps the industrialization of ‘peer work’ should rank fairly low on the scale of scary, but - at least for me - it’s up there.

In 1995 I had a very frightening experience that I have never discussed publicly before. At that time the main symptoms I was experiencing...

Coercion — the use of physical, legal, chemical, psychological, financial, and other forces to gain compliance — is intrinsic to our society’s employment, schooling, and parenting, but it isn’t to less “civilized” societies. Coercion fuels miserable marriages, unhappy families, and what we today call mental illness. Psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey, in Schizophrenia and Civilization, states “Schizophrenia appears to be a disease of civilization.” But Torrey is a strong advocate for coercive treatments, including forced medication — even though his own research shows a stronger relationship between severe mental illness and European-American civilization than with hypothesized biochemical agents that have never been found. Still, he has he not considered the toxic effects of coercion.

I’ve given the “the speech” hundreds of times to skeptical young people, to frightened families and to many homeless men and women. I’ve assured them all that “mental illness is like diabetes and your medications are like insulin.” I delivered this speech with all good intentions and unquestioned certainty of its veracity and helpfulness. I really bought the whole chemical imbalance narrative — hook, line and Seroquel.

President Obama called for a national mental health discussion a while ago and here are the details. It has the chance to be a dog and pony show as our peers were excluded from part of the planning process (making the discussion guide). But the organization that is running this has now recognized that problem and is working to balance different viewpoints on mental health. If we jump on it now, we have a chance to really get heard.

Thomas Insel, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), acknowledged yesterday in his "Director's Blog" that the long-term outcome studies of...

The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals yesterday rejected a lower court's dismissal of  Watson v. King-Vassel, saying that a jury is in fact sufficiently able...

R. D. Laing in America: Psychoanalyst Michael Guy Thompson worked with Laing for many years and was instrumental in organizing and managing Laing's post-Kingsley Hall...

R.D. LAING IN AMERICA Psychoanalyst and author Michael Guy Thompson worked with R. D. Laing in London for many years, and was instrumental in the...

Beyond Meds offers a collection of posts that look at the "mental illness" system from a variety of perspectives. Article →  

Dan Markingson was floridly psychotic and unable to give informed consent when University of Minnesota researchers coerced him into an industry-funded drug study. His mother, Mary Weiss, warned the researchers that Dan was in danger of killing himself, but she was ignored. Dan committed a violent suicide in 2004. Last week, after fighting the university and research regulators for nine years, Mary suffered a severe stroke. Her struggle for justice is in serious danger.

During the past 29 years I have been diagnosed with anxiety, depression, PTSD, Biploar II and complex PTSD. I have tried numerous drug combinations and have been through ECT several times. None of this helped me. My road to recovery started when I decided to rebel against conventional psychiatry.

Aeon Magazine tells of how, historically, psychoses and emerging technologies often go hand-in-hand. Article →

Trauma-informed Care Meets Pharma-informed Care: Social worker Wayne Munchel will focus on the intersection between trauma informed care/recovery models and biological psychiatry. Early intervention...

Wayne Munchel, LCSW, is a leader in mental health programs designed for transition age youth. He was also a founding staff member of The Village,...

Of all the beliefs that I have had about my experiences, the belief that I was ‘schizophrenic’ was the most damaging. In adopting the story that others told about me, and abandoning my own sense-making process, I held on to a belief that both hid my traumatic life experiences and rendered them irrelevant. Does it matter if we sometimes slip into the language of illness when we all agree that these experiences are meaningful, personal and have value? Yes. It does.

The Lived Experience Research Network Issue Briefs series promotes change through multiple perspectives. We recently launched our inaugural Fall 2013 edition of the LERN Issue Briefs series. These two-page briefs highlight issues of importance in the behavioral health and disabilities fields.

Researchers from Aarhus University in Denmark find from a 10-year follow-up of participants in a randomized controlled study of brief antipsychotic medication (the OPUS...

Steindór J. Erlingsson is a psychiatric survivor, writer and an independent scholar, with a BSc degree in biology, and MSc and PhD degrees in...

A New Beginning: Steindór J. Erlingsson, a psychiatric survivor and an independent scholar, writes about his life and recovery, the consumer movement and mental...

Researchers from the Universities of Stanford and Edinburgh found, in a comparison of 1,174 primary outcomes from 82 meta-anlyses of biological and behavioral research,...

Yoga, meditation and nutrition are the practices Cyndi used to save her life after a 12-year battle with severe depression, anxiety and a misdiagnosis of bipolar...

With nothing left to lose, I’d reached the point at which I had to make a choice: to fight, or to give up. Though things seemed to not be going my way, I decided to take back control and make drastic changes in hopes to survive. That’s when yoga, meditation and nutrition came into my life, but first, I had to find a doctor to help me get off the medication I was currently on.