Yearly Archives: 2013

The DSM claims to be a scientific system of classification. The validity of any system of scientific classification is the extent to which it can be shown to reflect the real world. Fifty years of study and investigation, and huge sums of money spent across the Western world on neuroscientific research institutes, on careers and equipment, has failed to establish the validity of a single psychiatric diagnosis.

The primary lesson of the mental health civil rights community is that we have to learn to lean on each other to get though adversity, which means opening up and admitting when things aren't moving in a direction we want or expected or try to typically project publicly. We have to ask for help. Here's what I'm chewing on or what's chewing on me.

Editor's Note: To protect the anonymity of her son, this author has published under a pseudonym. With the help of the Internet, my seventeen-year-old son...

Drugs that pass into the water supply can alter the behavior of fish, according to a paper published today in Science magazine. Experiments using...

Two generations of molecular genetic researchers have attempted, yet failed, to discover the genes that they believe underlie the major psychiatric disorders. The most recent failure is a molecular genetic study that was unable to find genes for symptoms of depression. Like most genetic researchers in psychiatry, the authors failed to consider the possibility that no such genes exist.

A recent New York Times front-page story about ADHD care gone awry concluded with disturbing quotes from a an information session that was held in Norfolk, VA last October. “ADD and Loving It?!” was sponsored by Children and Adults with Attention Deficit Disorder (CHADD)—the leading advocacy group for ADHD. The story raises questions our country’s love affair with ADHD by detailing the tragic death of an aspiring medical student from the Norfolk-Virginia Beach area who became addicted to ADHD drugs.

One of the things debated and discussed in blogs such as this, and in a lot of other places, is the nature of “mental...

LIVE AND LEARN   Gretchen LeFever Watson, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist whose research and intervention projects have received international scholarly and media attention, including appearances...

Live and Learn: Dr. Watson is a clinical psychologist, President of Safety and Learning Solutions, and adjunct faculty member at Old Dominion University. Contact her...

My public writing has brought my mother and I closer together than we’ve been in decades. There have been disagreements. But now, my almost ninety-year-old mother tells me she reads everything I write. She recently told me that she’s glad I see things so clearly.

So now we know Soderbergh’s movie Side Effects is not so Black/Noir after all – more Fifty Shades of Grey. Emily Hawkins (Rooney Mara) is put on Ablixa by her psychiatrist Jonathan Banks (Jude Law) and while on it kills her husband. She apparently murders him while sleep-walking triggered by Ablixa and sleep walking being a perfect defense against murder she is acquitted.

Many advocates for a long time have been unhappy with federally funded conferences that have a budget in the six figure area that are only held at luxury hotels. I've tried to come up with an alternative to Alternatives. I'm partnering with Paul Komarek of Defying Mental Illness to host our very first event. We're calling this the UnDiagnosing UnPlanned UnConference series. Our first event is in Cincinnati next week, Feb. 15 - 17, and we'd love for you to come.

Now is the time to harness our individual stories, our collective stories, to counter the negative and hateful stories painted about us in the media. We need to push back with stories of our own. Stories that give people hope. We will be filming, for the Obama administration's campaign to encourage discussion of mental health issues, as many people as possible telling their stories of how they built a life of meaning and purpose; what helped, what hurt, and what they see as promising policy directions.

Glen Spielmans, an associate professor of psychology, reviews the controversy over Robert Gibbons' studies which challenged the view that antidepressants are ineffective and cause...

Tom Sullivan of Fox News asks psychiatrist Peter Breggin, author of Medication Madness, whether drugs rather than guns are at the heart of mass...

Many of us are taught to fear the expression of strong emotions, and to hide or suppress big feelings. We have also erroneously been taught that only specially trained people or “professionals” are equipped to handle these experiences. But people knowledgeable in conventional treatment often aren’t exposed to community-based, holistic, common sense, person-to-person approaches. Many people have gained wisdom and resiliency by working through emotional distress, and it is helpful to do this with someone who understands the growth potential in these experiences.

Twenty-five years before Prozac, 1 in 10,000 of us per year was admitted for severe depressive disorder - melancholia. Today at any one point in time 1 in 10 of us are supposedly depressed and between 1 in 2 and 1 in 5 of us will be depressed over a lifetime. Around 1 in 10 pregnant women are on an antidepressant.

Clinical and research psychologist Paula Caplan presents a keynote address entitled "Psychiatric Survivors Speak Up: Harm From Psychiatric Diagnosis, and a Start on Solutions" at the 2012 National Association for Rights Protection and Advocacy (NARPA) Conference in Cincinnati, Ohio.

When even some establishment psychiatrists are delegitimizing DSM-5, it becomes far easier to delegitimize psychiatric labels.

A blog in Scientific American tells the story of Camille, who was prescribed a benzodiazepine despite her resistance and with reassurances regarding its addictiveness...

Prozac, having failed as an antihypertensive then anti-obesity drug, was marketed as an antidepressant after it lifted the spirits of five mildly depressed volunteers...

Psychotropic medications, including short-acting benzodiazepines, strongly increase the frequency of falls in the elderly, according to research from the Netherlands published in Maturitas: The...

Annals of Pharmacotherapy reports in a study of patients undergoing mechanical ventilation that 39% were given antipsychotic medication to prevent or treat delirium despite...

Mental Health Liberation: Lauren facilitates trainings and Dialogues of Discovery, inspired by her recently published memoir, Living for Two:  A Daughter’s Journey From Grief and Madness to...

MENTAL HEALTH LIBERATION Lauren Spiro’s vision of social justice and mental health liberation fuels her work, which is focused on inspiring compassionate action and spreading innovative...