Yearly Archives: 2013

Research drawing on the British national survey finds that, despite the fact that psychotic conditions and mood disorders have historically been approached as separate...

Researchers from Taiwan and the United States find, in a study of 1,752 inner-city infants born between 1960 and 1965 (the Johns Hopkins Pathways...

Bill George was born in England and emigrated to the Netherlands in 1975. He worked for a Dutch academic publishing house despite his diagnosis...

When I pick up a pen, I put down my fear. Sorry, they don't both fit into my hand at once. Meditation teachers often say the hardest part is getting to the cushion. The hardest part of writing is probably picking up the pen. So, pick up a pen, I dare you. Write even if you think no one will read it, even if you don't want anyone to read it.

After an hour of deliberation, jurors decided that the anticonvulsant Topamax (topiramate) had, in fact, caused April Czimmer's son to be born with a...

The Attorney General of Louisiana has filed suit against Pfizer, Inc. for concealing "serious issues" regarding Zoloft's efficacy. Citing a "deliberate, systematic practice" of...

From youtube: "Sascha Altman DuBrulhas been documenting and fomenting underground culture and radical peoples' movements since he was a teenager. From the anarchist squatter...

The buzz in academic publishing right now is the story about how several hundred open access journals accepted a fake research paper. Of much more concern is that there are top-tier medical journals which have published clinical trials, that were read by thousands of people, that influenced clinical decisions, that we now know were bogus, but have never been retracted.

Allen Frances considers the overreaches of "paradigm shifts" by the DSM-5 and NIMH, and Lucy Johnstone's call for "a conversation with service users along...

It is no mystery why everyone at the McNair Discovery Learning Center is alive today. Antoinette Tuff was respectful, responsive and kind to a man with a gun. She shared her own difficulties and offered her own humanity. This kind of “Tuff Love” involves real risk, but not more risk. It reaches across vast expanses of human confusion and distress - not to manage, control or subdue - but to attempt connection and offer a lifeline back to humanity. It is the public safety work of the future.

In Butte County, California, Law Enforcement and NAMI have recently partnered to provide identification cards for people in the mental health system. The cards reveal the person's psychiatric diagnosis and current medication prescriptions. This White Card project may be well-intentioned, but it makes me very uncomfortable. I believe it is a form of psychiatric profiling that could be adopted by law enforcement around the United States.

Sarah Knutson is an ex-lawyer, ex-therapist, survivor-activist.  She is an organizer at the Wellness & Recovery Human Rights Campaign. You can reach her at...

The Guardian and its partners in Europe - Le Monde, El Pais, La Stampa, Gazeta Wyborcza and Suddeutsche Zeitung - are conducting a global...

According to a leading group of psychiatric genetic researchers, writing in 1999, “From the perspective of psychiatric genetics, the Human Genome Project is an immense factory producing and refining the tools we will need to discover the genes that cause mental illness.” A 2002 “speculative outline” by a group helping to revise the DSM envisioned a future DSM-5 practice of classifying disorders on the basis of "the patient’s genotype, identifying symptom- or disease-related genes, resiliency genes, and genes related to therapeutic responses and side effects to specific psychotropic drugs.” A dozen or so years ago, at least some of the DSM-5 architects believed that genes would at long last be identified and would be integrated into the next version of the DSM. As we know, this did not happen.

Disclosure is an insufficient strategy for mitigating bias because bias does not result from the concealment of financial ties but from their effects. Even worse, social psychologists have demonstrated that when individuals disclose a competing interest, they give even more biased advice.

Over 100 million people in the US suffer from chronic pain – defined as pain lasting longer than 12 weeks. Up to 80% of those sufferers are women, many of whom report having been repeatedly brushed off or referred out by medical doctors who could find no discrete medical cause for the symptoms they reported. Some patients report an even harsher finding by their doctors: “To the best of my ability to determine, your pain is not medical in origin. I believe you need to be evaluated by a psychiatrist or psychologist who is qualified in psychosomatic issues.”

Twenty-five years after R.D. Laing’s death, are we more humane and compassionate in our treatment of those at our mercy? It is difficult to say. But one thing that we cannot deny, our culture has become even more “medicalized” than at any time in history. The medical metaphor that Laing found more or less acceptable when explaining what he thought therapy is, has become increasingly literal. More and more, anything that pains us is a condition that can be treated.

The Atlantic offers up "A neuropsychological approach to happiness, by meeting core needs (safety, satisfaction, and connection) and training neurons to overcome a negativity...

In 1994, my nineteen-year old daughter, Cristina, was diagnosed with chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML). It was a diagnosis that came totally out of the blue and as a complete shock. Soon after she was diagnosed, it became clear that I wasn’t going to be able to sleep because of the tremendous stress, so I asked the very kind doctor who diagnosed Cristina if he could give me a prescription for something that would help me sleep. He agreed, and so began my “relationship” with Xanax. I had never taken anything like that before and didn’t know anything about it. All I knew was that as my daughter’s primary caregiver, I needed sleep in order to fight to keep her alive.

Madeline is originally from the Bronx, New York and has done extensive community work throughout her life. She is the editor of two published...

At the end of an hour long discussion with Holyoke High School students in Holyoke, MA, I was grasping quarter page slips of folded paper as it they were sheets of gold. On these slips of paper were questions the students asked me, as well as their answers to my questions, “What can you do to make yourself feel happier as an alternative to psychiatric drugs?” and “How do you get through hard times?” They included love, eating, snuggling, my boyfriend, my girlfriend, green tea, good friends, drawing, playing guitar, a new book, flowers, fluffy things (pandas), writing, music, talking to friends, not isolating myself and sex novels.

Allen Frances traces the history of empathic listening from Philippe Pinel in the early 19th century, through his own recent conversation with Eleanor Longden....

Research from UCLA finds that rats exposed to early life trauma showed aberrations  of stress hormones, receptors in the amygdala, and inhibited or avoidant...

Last week Matt Samet posted about a setback he’s recently had. Setbacks for me remain routine and normal. They are part of the excruciatingly non-linear process of recovery.

Andrew Yoder is a Clinical Social Work Associate (CSWA) working within the mental health system with low-income individuals and families labeled by the state...