Yearly Archives: 2015

-Newsweek visits the Hearing Voices Network.

Teaching psychiatrists the appropriate prescribing guidelines for patients with schizophrenia did not reduce the incidence of inappropriate prescribing.

-Simon Fraser University health scientists argue that we need to start doing more randomized controlled trials to better understand the negative impacts of environmental pollutants on human bodies and brains.

-Are publicly funded research centers the answer to curbing corruption and bias in medical and psychiatric studies?

The version of psychiatry that many professionals, politicians and laypeople would like to be true is that mental illnesses are specific brain disorders with specific drug treatments, to which they are very responsive if identified early. In reality, the way we categorise mental illnesses is arbitrary, and the diagnostic criteria are over inclusive. Whilst psychiatric drugs can be helpful, the dream of a quick fix by targeted drugs has become a nightmare where we often do more harm than good in the way we use drugs, e.g. against depression, schizophrenia and ADHD.

Dr. Peter Parry is a child & adolescent psychiatrist, clinical director of mental health services at the Lady Cilento Children’s Hospital in Brisbane and...

Depressed elderly people are more likely to suffer heart disease not because of their depression, but apparently due to antidepressant drugs.

-Psychiatrist Jose Andres Saez Fonseca disposes with the language of the diagnostic manuals, and tries to grapple with different ways of seeing.

-Psychiatric Times will continue its series of commentaries on how to fix the mental health system through 2015.

  Editors' Note:  We at Mad in America have all known and loved Leonard. He truly represents the best of why we are engaged in these...

As a person who has been psychiatrized, but hasn’t faced long-term institutionalization, I have to accept that I can’t know that level of loss of power and vulnerability. (But I can tell you even short stays are enough to begin to understand.) And to be a person of color with psychiatric labels interfacing with the police? It’s like the perfect storm. (A type of ‘perfection’ that occurs more often than most, given that people of color are more likely to be diagnosed in the first place.)

For four decades I have been an activist challenging the mental health industry. More and more I feel that the climate crisis should be one of the highest priorities for social change led by people who have personally experienced psychiatric abuse, and our allies. I affectionately call us The Mad Movement. It seems that almost every speaker against global warming ends their message the same way, that we can stop this catastrophe if society has the “will.” I believe that participants in The Mad Movement have an important insight into real sickness in society. As a psychiatric survivor, I have seen too much labeling of creative maladjustment as ill. We need to shake off our world’s complacency and numbness, also known as “normality.”

First generation antipsychotics seem to cause general brain volume loss, while second generation antipsychotics seem to both increase and decrease the thickness of different parts of the brain.

-Psychiatric Times' most popular posts of 2014.

With great regularity, I receive emails from people—“patients,” family members, and mental health workers—who are frustrated by this fact: the psychiatrists they meet, and the larger psychiatric community, are simply not aware of research that questions the merits of psychiatric medications. Many providers, for instance, do not know of Martin Harrow’s long-term study of schizophrenia outcomes. We at Mad in America started Mad in America Continuing Education to produce online courses that will fill in this knowledge gap. And now that we have our first courses up, we need your help.

When people are seeing the world really different than we do, it’s often reassuring to think that there must be something wrong with them – because if they are completely wrong, or ill, then we don’t have to rethink our own sense of reality, we can instead be confident about that own understandings encompass all that we need to know. But it can be disorienting and damaging to others to have their experiences defined as “completely wrong” or “ill.” And we ourselves become more ignorant when we are too sure that there is no value in other ways of looking or experiencing.

-What are scientists learning from brain scans of babies in the womb?

-The industry of mobile apps that diagnose users' physical and mental ailments is already worth some $4 billion.

Too many studies of atypical antipsychotic medications are still not meeting even the minimum scientific standards of the internationally agreed-upon CONSORT guidelines for drug trials.

-An intimate personal story of a husband and wife struggling through psychological crises together.

-Psychiatrists analyze why US bipolar diagnoses in children and adolescents increased 40 times over in less than 10 years.

What are Extreme Experiences? Other terms for them are Spiritual Crisis or Spiritual Emergency. With the appropriate support many find the experiences profoundly transformative. However, observers or relatives may have different beliefs about extreme experiences: perhaps that a person is having a psychological breakdown or mental health problems, or is psychotic or experiencing schizophrenia.

On December 29, Nassir Ghaemi, MD, a psychiatrist and a professor at Tufts Medical Center, published on Medscape an article titled Psychiatry Prospects for 2015: Out With the Old, In With the New? In it, he writes that with the changes in health care "Clinicians can stop pretending that relationship and social problems have to be shoved into a biological-sounding DSM category (such as major depressive disorder or generalized anxiety disorder) and treated with the only thing insurance companies would reimburse long-term: drugs." So there it is, starkly stated: Clinicians, by which he clearly means psychiatrists, have been pretending.

Natalie Tobert, PhD, is a British medical anthropologist, who has done original fieldwork research in India, Sudan and UK. She has created a Spiritual...

-A radio show from inside a Buenos Aires psychiatric hospital.