Yearly Archives: 2013

A Colorado based company, Sundance Diagnostics, contacted me a few months ago to tell me about work they are doing to develop a genetic test to predict suicide risk when patients are prescribed antidepressant drugs. Their plan is to sequence the entire human genome of about 360 patients and controls to see if antidepressant drug risk can definitively be predicted.

Olga Runciman is Chair of the Danish Hearing Voices Network. Originally a psychiatric nurse, she herself became a patient, and experienced the full force of...

Researchers in London and Spain, in a prospective, randomized, study of long-term (3 year) effects of first- and second-generation antipsychotics on neurocognition in 79...

Scientists at Microsoft, Stanford and Columbia University, using automated software to mine data from 82 million internet searches for information related to, found a...

The humor newspaper The Onion satirizes the conversion of transient human emotions into lifelong illnesses, reporting that "Shortly after losing grip of a helium-filled...

Deconstructing, Reconstructing Abnormality: Dr. Raskin is professor of psychology and counseling at SUNY New Paltz, focusing on social constructions of abnormality in psychology and...

DECONSTRUCTING AND RECONSTRUCTING ABNORMALITY Jonathan D. Raskin is professor of psychology and counseling at the State University of New York at New Paltz. His scholarship...

German author and activist Peter Lehmann presents "Recovery by Taking Psychiatric Drugs versus Recovery by Coming Off of Psychiatric Drugs" at the 2012 International Society for Ethical Psychology and Psychiatry (ISEPP) Conference in Philadelphia, PA.

I attended Milt Greek’s educational opportunity at Cooper Riis’ The Farm last February 25, 2013 and it was especially fortuitous for me. What I was able to glean from the presentation, in short, was that it shook me up.

In his book, Prayer is Good Medicine, physician and researcher Larry Dossey maintains that praying for one's self or others can make a scientifically measurable difference in recovering from illness or trauma. It is one thing to understand such a healing intellectually; it is another to know it from experience. Such an experience came to me in the fall of 1996.

Researchers in China find an acute reduction in white matter in the frontal lobe following six weeks of antipsychotic treatment for "first-episode schizophrenia". Results...

An issue that we think deserves more media attention than it is currently receiving is the idea of Preventive Intervention in Psychiatry. The goal of Preventive Intervention is to reduce the rate of psychiatric diagnoses in an at-risk group of people by pretreating all the group members with a medication. For instance, could the rate of PTSD in the military be reduced by pretreating everybody in the military with an SSRI?

On February 28th, the New York Times reported the latest psychiatric disorder “gene finding” claim in an article entitled “5 Disorders Share Genetic Risk Factors, Study Shows,” The Times reporter described a study that claimed to have identified shared genes associated with five psychiatric disorders: autism spectrum disorder, attention/deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, and schizophrenia. We have seen thousands of such claims in psychiatry since the 1960s, and we have also seen that these claims do not survive replication attempts.

My path to becoming an activist began at a young age. My parents were both visionaries in their own ways. They both saw the possibility of creating a world in which all people would be able to live satisfying lives. They both were strong supporters of the Civil Rights Movement.

Not long ago I had a conversation with a psychiatrist. He told me about a diagnostic dilemma he’d run up against at work; When a judge makes an unfunded treatment mandate as part of her judgment, she pressures the doctor to make a “payable” psychiatric diagnosis. If the doctor stretches the truth out of sympathy and provides an inaccurate but payable diagnosis so that his patient can have access to medical care and money to live on, he is committing fraud that can mean heavy fines and incarceration for himself.

In August 2010, my friend and fellow ‘suicide mum’ Deb Williams and I established CASPER – Community Action on Suicide Prevention Education & Research. CASPER’s goals are to provide peer support to families bereaved by suicide, to educate politicians and opinion leaders on suicide and its prevention and to support families and communities to reclaim suicide prevention from medical professionals and governments.

Machiavelli had it right. “There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order to things.” Ever since we launched our DSM-5 Boycott three weeks ago, we’ve received support from organizations and individuals but have become entangled in more wrangling than I ever would have anticipated.

Editor's Note: The author has written her story using a different name.  Here, she's explained why: "In my country, Poland, the stigma attached to the...

The United States desperately needs good programs to help people withdraw from neuroleptic drugs. From all I have seen and heard, there aren’t any - none at least that can reputably claim to get good results on a fairly consistent basis. Again and again I find myself challenged to envision such a program, and in reply to the challenge I have broken down this hypothetical program into various components.

A large-scale study of depression-related brain activity may also reveal whether a connection exists between the high rates of both psychotropic medication and suicide...

Many of us in the consumer/survivor movement have begun to worry that recovery is being co-opted. That it is being used too easily, and has lost its meaning. I think we live in bubble. Outside our world, the larger society has not even heard that recovery is possible. In fact, society hears a constant litany, through major media, that emotional distress is due to chemical imbalance. Today young people are told they will never recover, and should accept that they have a life long illness.

(dictionary.com) Cult, n. a particular system of religious worship, especially with reference to its rites and ceremonies. an instance of great veneration of a person, ideal, or...

This is a transcript of my keynote speech at Alternatives 2012, which a Madness Radio listener recently transcribed.

Real quick, as I’m sure you’ve heard my story before: “Medication-induced mania.” Primary care writes prescription for antidepressant to alleviate simple stress. Pill causes...

Japanese engineers have devised a robotic rat that bullies laboratory rats into a state of depression, creating a model of human depression they deem...