Yearly Archives: 2015

A screenshot of the Facebook of the Oregon shooter, taken by a colleague of mine before the site was taken down, has the following comment from the shooter: “Chris Harper Mercer, August 16: I have a pill bottle with like five types of pills mixed in. I don’t know which ones are the sleep aids, so I just took four of each.” Once again, we have a shooter who has been through the “mental health” system and has probably been taking drugs.

Benzodiazepines may be the most popular, widely used, and immediately effective of all the psychiatric drugs. At the same time they are perhaps one of the most dangerous, addictive, and abused mind-altering substances on the planet. Since the 1980’s psychiatry and their partners in the pharmaceutical industry have spent billions of dollars marketing these drugs and justifying their efficacy in the “treatment” of anxiety and insomnia. Psychiatry has been able to create a patient base of millions of people who are dependent on these drugs and are forced to remain “co-dependent” customers of psychiatrists and other medical doctors in order to procure them.

Recent calls for screening for a range of mental health problems point to an important recognition of the need to identify and address emotional suffering. Such screening offers an opportunity to decrease the stigma and shame that often accompany emotional pain. A powerful new documentary, The Dark Side of the Full Moon, calls attention to the under-recognition and under-treatment of postpartum depression. In one scene, a mother refers to resistance from doctors who lack resources to address positive screens as "absurd.” She is correct, if the alternative to screening is to look the other way in the face of women who are suffering.

In July, 2015 an article was published in the ^{New York Times Magazine} about a pair of male Colombian MZ twins (monozygotic, identical), where one member had been accidentally switched at birth with the member of another MZ pair. Historically, the ^Times and other mainstream (corporate) media outlets have reported on genetic and biological theories of human behavioral differences from the perspective that these influences are important, usually quoting the statements of scientists and twin researchers who promote these positions, while largely ignoring the views of their critics. The genetic determinist theories they often promote coincide with the interests of the economically and politically powerful sections of American society (including the drug companies), who finance and promote the research.

With the explosion of genetic testing and the emerging field of pharmacogenetics, patients can now take a DNA test and receive psychiatric drug recommendations customized to fit their genetic makeup. In an editorial for the latest issue of the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, Columbia University Psychiatrist Robert Klitzman warns that clinicians need to be aware of the limitations of these genetic tests being marketed to them.

NBC News reports that "Genetic tests to identify the most effective psychiatry drugs are the hot new thing in the race to create personalized treatments based on people's DNA.” An investigation by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting, however, found that these new tests are based on small studies conducted by device manufacturers, and those with financial conflicts on interest.

I think it is indeed true that many people go to psychiatrists specifically to get drugs. This is because it is widely known that psychiatrists will prescribe psychiatric drugs readily. In fact, since about 1980 or so, they really don't do much of anything else. For most psychiatrists, a "patient" returning at regular intervals for "med-checks" and refills is the ideal scenario. Within the psychiatric community, there is, I think, a great deal more concern expressed about non-compliant "patients" than there is about those who adhere faithfully to the prescription and keep coming back for more.

When I was twenty-eight, I had what is commonly referred to as a “psychotic break.” It was nothing like what I would’ve imagined, given the cultural stereotypes. It was not in the least nonsensical. There was an exacting inner logic and meaning. Twenty-two years later, I continue to believe in the harrowing greatness of what my younger self went through.

'How to Touch a Hot Stove' (the centerpiece of what is being called 'The Hot Stove Project') is a film that professes to be about a new civil rights movement. It employs interview clips from a wide array of 'big names' on all sides of the 'mental health' world, in a purported effort to compare and contrast the many voices that lay claim to that concept. In fact, the filmmakers did a fairly good job of writing about a film that would surely have stood out in a sea of chemically imbalanced cinema. Unfortunately, the film they wrote about is not the film they made.

There is a hunger out there for a foundational critique of psychiatry—something that pulls no punches, minces no words. That is, there is a hunger for a reasoned antipsychiatry position. Something that explains how we ended up here, provides solid evidence that psychiatry should be abandoned, and begins theorizing what we might do instead.

Elizabeth Hill has an MFA in fiction from Columbia University. She is currently revising a novel based on her journey through madness and the...

The Guardian reports on the Recovery Bag Project, set up, “to provide solace and comfort to people experiencing mental health crises,” by self-described “mental health warrior” Polly Rogers.

The antidepressant Paxil has been linked to birth defects. "An Ohio federal judge on Wednesday ruled that GlaxoSmithKline must face a product liability suit brought by a woman whose child was born with heart defects after she took the antidepressant Paxil during her pregnancy, ruling that she had successfully pled fraud."

Good Pharma is the story of the Mario Negri Institute. Mario Negri was a wealthy patron who on his death in 1960 bequeathed a large sum of money to support independent pharmaceutical research to an upcoming researcher Silvio Garattini. Garattini and Alfredo Leonardi set about building an Institute centred on the new drugs and new techniques. They continue to grow without ever having patented any of their many discoveries or concealing any of the data from experiments that didn’t work out or accommodating any of their trials to industry’s wishes.

Nunavut, Canada’s largest and northernmost territory, is suffering from a suicide rate that is 10 times the national average. “In the case of Inuit boys 15 to 19,” CBC News reports, “the suicide rate is 40 times higher than those of their peers in the rest of Canada.”

The Psychiatric Advisor reports on new research from King’s College London that suggests that antipsychotics can cause serious harm to people with Parkinson’s.

Writing in The Atlantic, James Hamblin reports that research continues to show that physical exercise is integral to “childhood cognition and brain health,” especially for children who exhibit symptoms associated with ADHD. These findings, Hamblin comments, have been discussed with a “phenomenal degree of reservation compared to the haste with which millions of kids have been introduced to amphetamines and other stimulants to address said ADHD.”

I am humbled to share with you my life’s journey, and more importantly to convey a recent experience that has transmuted everything, opening up a new frontier of being more fully alive. I am beginning to see the invisible; or should I say I am beginning to feel it, because it is an inner experience.

The current view of mental illness and its accessory idea, mental health, were born of the Enlightenment. Formerly, spiritual ailments had been considered sins or heresies. They were allegedly produced by the diabolical interventions of witches, Satan, and/or Jews, and confessors relied on prayer or holy water to remedy the soul. With the decline of Christianity in Europe, those ailments were reinterpreted in secular (mechanistic, atomistic, materialist) terms that reduced the self to its molecular substructure. The mind became equated with the brain, and remedies naturally became mechanical or chemical—insulin shock, lobotomy, electroshock, surgery, and drugs.

NPR reports on how ketamine is being used off-label to treat depression.

Alesandra Rain is an author and prescription drug expert for the O-Reilly Factor, Fox News Channel and ABC, lectures worldwide and is frequently a...

While publication bias has been known to overestimate the efficacy of antidepressant treatments, a new study suggests that research on the use of psychotherapy in depression suffers from a similar bias.

Tracey Libby specializes in the management of pain, chronic illness and mindbody health. Tracey also sees clients struggling with other life issues and transitions...

Tracey Libby is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor and EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) Practitioner in private practice in Andover, MA, where she specializes in...

Global leaders in the critical psychiatry movement met on 18 Sep 2015 for a one-day conference to address an urgent public health issue: the iatrogenic harm caused by the over-prescription of psychiatric medications. We were treated to an expert review of the ways in which the widespread use of harmful and barely (if at all) helpful medicines has become the mainstay of psychiatry’s contribution to society. At gatherings such as this, when people discover I am a psychiatrist I often become a lightning rod for their anger and frustration. It’s okay; it comes with the job, but a couple of things happened at Roehampton which reminded me why this can happen, and why all of this is so much more complicated than the simple black-and-white “Pharma and psychiatry bad, everyone else good.”