Yearly Archives: 2015

In order for you to understand where I am coming from, you probably need to know a bit about how I got here. Throughout my psychiatric training I had always, in the back of mind, this question: What is the difference between my suffering and those of my patients? How come they get all this treatment and I got none? Why do they have a ‘brain disease’ (there was a time when I tentatively believed in this sort of thing), whilst I, who was at times symptomatically severe enough to warrant medication, have no brain disease? The answer seems plain to me now. I had suffered exactly in the same way as many of the people I see every day do, but I had been lucky enough to avoid labeling and drugging.

We often need a new lens to look through in order to grasp a better way to understand, conceptualize and accept the real reasons behind the sometimes annoying and frustrating behaviors associated with child development. As many of you who read my blog know, I have grown tired of the increased trend of early diagnosis of children. I'm all for early interventions to help kids overcome learning deficits and developmental delays, but why — beyond education compliance policy and getting insurance companies to pay for the bill — do we have to label them with a learning disability or permanent mental disorder?

-A Forbes article argues that the American Psychological Association's public response to the report on the CIA torture program "has been a well-orchestrated misdirection."

-The New Yorker reports that Martin Seligman isn't pleased with how his research got applied.

-Is it reasonable to compare the roles American psychologists played in the CIA torture program to the roles that psychiatists played in Nazi Germany?

Elahe Hessamfar is a former business executive and has a PhD in Divinity from the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. She has an MA...

In The Daisy Project, Daisy’s upcoming book, she shares her insider knowledge as a former mental health nurse and as a former psychiatric patient....

Many of us spend a lifetime avoiding our emotional pain, and it does become more and more toxic as long as we keep it buried. It will literally make us ill, physically and mentally, as Bessel Van talks about in the book, The Body Keeps Score. The little quip, "What you resist, persists" has proven very true in my life. The only way out of that trap is to stop avoiding and learn in whatever way makes sense to us as individuals to feel once again and to embrace and absorb and therefore transform the pain of our lives. This is how I am healing.

The Division of Clinical Psychology of the British Psychological Society published a paper titled Understanding Psychosis and Schizophrenia. The central theme of the paper is that the condition known as psychosis is better understood as a response to adverse life events rather than as a symptom of neurological pathology. The paper was wide-ranging and insightful and, predictably, drew support from most of us on this side of the issue and criticism from psychiatry.  Section 12 of the paper is headed "Medication" and under the subheading "Key Points" you'll find this quote: "[Antipsychotic] drugs appear to have a general rather than a specific effect: there is little evidence that they are correcting an underlying biochemical abnormality."

DIALOGICAL PSYCHIATRY Genuinely humanistic dialogue should be at the heart of good mental health care. A vast body of research attests to the central role...

Dialogical Psychiatry: In his column, Dr. Russell Razzaque, a UK-based psychiatrist, discusses mindfulness and related practices that help clinicians connect with themselves in order...

REFLECTIONS OF A UK PSYCHIATRY TRAINEE Tom Stockmann is a psychiatrist in London. He is critical of what he sees as the existing excessive biomedical emphasis in psychiatry. He is currently training...

Reflections of a UK Psychiatry Trainee: Tom is a psychiatrist in London. He writes about his reflections as he journeys through UK higher psychiatry training, from exploring the causes of his disillusionment with the current mental...

-Hannah Giorgis describes how she felt even more "crazy" when her mental health professionals denied the existence of racism against black people in Britain.

People who have taken a psychedelic drug at least once have less suicidal thinking than the general population.

-The Atlantic reports on the history of pathologizing and de-pathologizing different sexual practices.

The Recovering Psychiatrist: Jeremy is a British trained psychiatrist, working in the public sector in Finland. His primary workplace is within a psychosis rehabilitation...

THE RECOVERING PSYCHIATRIST Jeremy Wallace is a British-trained psychiatrist, working in the public sector in Finland. His primary workplace is within a psychosis rehabilitation clinic. He...

There were days that I’d wake up and all I could do was cry for no particular reason, just another miserable day of withdrawal. However, the idea of taking photos would get me out of the house. Especially on those days, the absolutely only thing that would get me to move at all was the idea of taking photos. One particular day, I was just crying, crying, crying, and as soon as I got to a beautiful spot that I loved, I stopped crying, took photos, and felt at peace. I even found that the days I felt the worst were the days I took the best photos.

Within the mental health profession, clinicians and researchers who value a system of categorical illnesses and individual defects too often proclaim that the major feature delineating "real psychosis" from other "disorders" is the presence of delusions. Two recent articles in the New York Times exemplified for me how skewed this assertion is. It also led to a greater awareness, more specifically, of how problematic it is to view so-called delusions as meaningless indicators of disease . . . for we all experience delusion. How one experiences the self, the world, and relationships (usually based on our relationships with our caregivers) determines the level with which one must cling to seemingly irrational ideas in order to maintain a sense of order and meaning in the world. Let me explain . . .

-The findings of many neuroscientific studies are really just random background noise.

-"It’s hard to listen to a psychiatrist who sounds so broken," writes Sulome Anderson in The Atlantic.

Researchers believe they have found "the smoking gun" that links common contaminants leaching from plastics to "adverse brain development and hyperactivity."

-AlterNet reports on a lawsuit that accuses a police officer of abusing his mental health law powers.

There are more and more of us who are determined to build an international movement that doesn’t forget its history, and that reweaves solidarity and community back into a model of mental and emotional and spiritual health. The system we live under is organized to keep a small number of people in control of the rest of us. Those who don’t fit into the model are drugged and silenced. We — the Mad Ones, the ones who have no choice but to feel the suffering of this planet and the people on it — we have a responsibility to create a new world that can hold our visions and brilliance. We have a responsibility to know our own histories of oppression and resistance. We carry with us the memories of the dead, the tortured, the exiled, and the ones whose flames can never be extinguished.