Yearly Archives: 2013

Is it really best to force someone into the hospital when they are suicidal? Do suicidal feelings plus "risk factors" really mean professionals can predict whether someone might try to kill themselves? And are suicidal feelings the symptom of a treatable illness that should include medication prescription?

ABC News discovers that the military is resorting to antipsychotics to quiet traumatized soldiers, rather than treating the trauma. Article →

MIA blogger Adam Urato on Boston's WBUR radio station, talking about recent research linking antidepressants with autism. Article →

Nature writes of the paucity of agreement on how to define or describe mental illness. "The problem is that biologists have been unable to...

At the 50th American Psychosomatic Society meeting in New York, Michael Shepherd was speaking. His topic - The Placebo. When the lecture finished, Lou Lasagna said "this paper is now open for questions." Nothing happened. Nobody said anything at all. Lasagna couldn't refrain from commenting: "There are 3 possible explanations. First, you were all asleep and therefore you heard nothing. Secondly, it was so bad that since this speaker has come 3,000 miles you didn't want to embarrass him. Third, it is genuinely so original and new that you don't quite know what to make of it. I'll leave you to decide which it was". What had Shepherd said?

ALL OF US OR NONE OF US Chaya Grossberg is a writer, teacher, coach and group facilitator living in San Francisco. She teaches classes and...

All of Us or None of Us: Chaya questions the idea that some of us are "mentally ill" and others of us are not.  She...

Paul is a founding member of the Hearing Voices Network and INTERVOICE. He has developed community mental health projects, self-advocacy services, supported housing, social...

Paul Baker is a community development worker. He is one of the founding members of the Hearing Voices Network in England and INTERVOICE, the...

Gary Greenberg writes in the New Yorker about psychiatry's longstanding quest for scientific validity. Article →

David Romprey walked up to me one day when I was in the middle of planning the next new 16-bed facility in a community setting for people who were in our state hospitals in Oregon. Progress was in the making. He asked why I called these places 16-“bed” facilities. Answering matter-of-factly what seemed obvious, I replied that these residences, nicely furnished in pleasant neighborhoods, had 16 beds. Looking me straight in the eye, as he always did, David asked me, “Do you think we’re lying around prostrate all the time?”

For the last month or so, Mad in America has been hard at work building a directory of “mental health” providers across North America (and eventually, we hope, the world) who will work with people wanting to come off psychotropic drugs.  I’ve been honored to have been tasked with the responsibility of building this directory, and I have to say, it’s been inspiring to talk to people all over the country who do this work, and who “get it”.

Based on a psychiatrist's recommendation that the effects of citalopram (Celexa) had contributed to a 61 year-old grandmother's lethal bludgeoning of her friend of...

The U.K.'s Mail reports of an effect of SSRIs that, though rare, has shown up in significant numbers of people according to David Healy's...

Researchers in Germany, China and Australia teamed up to find, through a meta-analysis of research pertaining to 1045 patients receiving antipsychotics, that augmentation with...

Research into stigmatizing attitudes towards behavior, published in Early Intervention in Psychiatry, finds that most study subjects did not spontaneously apply diagnostic labels to...

French researchers looked at the outcomes of 467 "antipsychotic drug-naive" patients six months after a first psychotic episode (and treatment with medication), finding that...

Chinese researchers find, in a literature review for the International Journal of Endocrinology find an increased rate of osteoporosis among people with a schizophrenia...

Carina Håkansson, co-founder of the Family Care Foundation in Sweden, discusses her work with family care homes, psychotherapy and family therapy absent from psychiatric diagnoses and manuals.

The National Council on Disability is holding an in-person public comment session on April 23 regarding its engagement with the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. I have submitted the following comments on behalf of the Center for the Human Rights of Users and Survivors of Psychiatry (CHRUSP).

YouTube →

A study of the Swedish medical birth registry, conducted by researchers from Sweden, the U.K., and the U.S.A., found a 3.3X greater risk of...

You May Be Suffering From Antidepressants (The Adbusters) YouTube →

Human knowledge of the relationship between nutrition and mental function probably goes back many thousands of years, but it has been documented for ‘only’ about 2700 years. Our ancestors knew that nutrition was a big part of the mental health picture. The pharmaceutical era eclipsed the rich historical knowledge that our ancestors had about the importance of food for maintaining good mental health.

In previous posts in this series, I noted that the standard treatment of conditions labeled as schizophrenia (and related disorders) is to start neuroleptics early and to continue them indefinitely. This is based on the belief that untreated psychosis is bad for the brain and that relapse is much higher when the drugs are stopped than when they are continued. The rationale for this approach, and my discussion of the limitations of these assertions, were the topics of previous blogs in this series. In this final post I want to discuss how realistic this paradigm of care is.