Yearly Archives: 2013

If the US wishes to maintain its reputation as a leader in the field of disability rights, it is not enough to assist other countries in building ramps and developing accessible technology. Those are laudable aims but are at best half of what the CRPD requires. There is a new world in disability rights, and the US risks being left behind unless there is a reversal of course that commits to full domestic implementation in compliance with standards that have been set by the international community with US participation.

Dr. Terry Lynch says that "Long ago I began to question the whole categorization of normal and abnormal, which is what doctors tend to...

Professor John Nash discusses the discrepancies between the book & film "A Beautiful Mind" and his life.  While he endorses the portrayal of mental...

The New York Times reports on new research from multiple sources that finds focused attention on insomnia is proving to be a "cheap, relatively...

A Philadelphia jury yesterday ordered Johnson & Johnson subsidiary Janssen to pay $11 million to the parents of a five-year-old boy for failure to warn...

A colleague and I have been tracking individuals who elect to reduce their dose of neuroleptic drug. The two year results are presented here.

Behaviorism and Mental Health: Philip Hickey is a retired psychologist.  He has worked in prisons (UK and US), addiction units, community mental health centers,...

Through the act of deep listening to personal stories of distress and healing, I have become convinced that even the most well-meaning mental health professionals are persistently asking the wrong questions. We are operating within a system that prizes the stability, conformity, and sedation of persons with experiences too unusual or too "disruptive" to social norms. It is a system that asks the question, "What is wrong with you?" and it is a system that defines "fixing" the problem as managing symptoms so that people aren't a bother (financially, logistically, and socially) to other people.

I learned a lot about the meaning of community in Senegal, West Africa where I lived for a few years. One day while I was still learning to speak Mandinka, the language of my village, I asked “How do I say, I am going running (alone, by myself)?” It was explained to me that there was no word for "alone" in Mandinka.

The Washington Post's Michael Gerson writes on the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities as an example of how "aspects of...

Sinéad O'Connor discusses mental health issues with TIME magazine this week, singling out the media's tendency to diagnose "without qualification," and adding that "mental health...

In the face of concerns that large numbers of children were being incorrectly diagnosed with pediatric bipolar disorder, the DSM–V introduced Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder (DMDD). In the scramble by drug companies to produce evidence that their drug should be prescribed to this new population of mentally ill children, the manufacturer of Risperidone paid to test their drug on a group of children. The study does not investigate whether treatment with Risperidone has any therapeutic benefit to the children, whether it cures or treats DMDD or ‘rage outbursts.’ It is quite open that Risperidone is being trialled for its efficacy as a chemical restraint.

In recent months the English pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has assiduously portrayed itself as an advocate of transparency, and in support of access to clinical trial data. Well, in support of "Responsible Access." "Responsible" here essentially means that a researcher commits to the primacy of RCTs and statistical significance over an analysis of adverse events. It would not, for example, be responsible to claim that an SSRI causes suicide, a statin muscle damage or cognitive failure, or hypoglycemics cause hypoglycemia unless a trial has shown this to happen to a Statistically Significant extent – and they never do.

The U.K.'s Guardian writes "Schizophrenia isn't a specific, rare or rigorously defined illness. Instead, it covers a wide range of often unrelated conditions, all...

Britain's The Independent tells the story of Lloyd Dres, a 44-year-old former stock trader, who has been trying to make sense of the "paranoid...

At least 250 lawsuits involving Johnson & Johnson's improper marketing of Risperdal are pending in Pennsylvania's Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas, according to information...

Analysis in the British Medical Journal concludes that the lowered thresholds for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder diagnosis in DSM-5 will mean "that many children...

The historic divide between the “respectable” vs. the “renegades” is the subject of historian Thaddeus Russell’s A Renegade History of the United States, which argues that when renegade groups gain civil rights and social acceptability, they lose their renegade culture. How do psychiatric survivors, mad priders, and those with lived experience of alternate consciousness fit into the tradition of Russell’s historic renegades?

When I lived in Massachusetts I taught yoga and led writing groups for alternative mental health communities. While the organizations I worked for were alternative, many of the students and participants were heavily drugged with psychiatric pharmaceuticals. There was one skinny teenager I'd never have forgotten who listed the drugs he was on for me once in the yoga room after class: a long list of stimulants, neuroleptics, moods stabilizers; far too many drugs and classes of drugs to remember. I was at the housewarming party of an old friend, and who should walk in but that boy who used to come to my yoga classes and writing groups religiously. And he was no longer a boy; he was now a young man. “I'm thinking yoga teacher,” he said. I nodded. Did he remember where? “I'm not stupid,” he said, as if reading my mind. “I'm not on drugs anymore. I'm not stupid anymore.”

Marine corps veteran Thomas Brennan tells of his PTSD, suicide attempt, and entry into the psychiatric system that he describes as "three days that convinced...

A Texas man filed a lawsuit in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas against Johnson & Johnson and its subsidiary, Janssen, in connection to...

Research from the University of Cambridge finds that "dopamine dysregulation per se is unlikely to be the primary cause underlying attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder pathology...

On the 7th of November, Robert Whitaker was here in Copenhagen to officially launch the Danish translation of his book, . While we were celebrating the day, in another part of Denmark, psychiatry was preparing its attack. A professor of psychiatry Poul Videbech, one of our finest, specializing in depression with a particular emphasis on electroshock, was busy writing a review. The title of his review is “The Boy Has No Clothes On” and as you can imagine with such a title, the review is hardly going to be favorable, indeed it smacks of condescending paternalism framing the well-worn scenario for establishing psychiatric supremacy.

Naturopathic doctor Lauren Deville reviews "Anatomy of an Epidemic" and the evidence that the "chemical imbalance" theorized to underlie mental illness is not only...

The San Francisco Chronicle reviews Jon Ronson's "The Psychopath Test", which chronicles the meteoric growth of the DSM in "chaotic editorial meetings in a small...