Yearly Archives: 2015

Natalie Tobert is a medical anthropologist, the author of Spiritual Psychiatries, a visiting lecturer at Brighton and Sussex Medical School, and seminar facilitator in hospitals...

Losing a loved one to suicide hurts like hell: there’s an obvious truth if there ever was one. But there are other truths, some hard, some hopeful. If you’ve suffered such a loss yourself, you know too much of these truths already.

Figuring Shit Out: Amy Biancolli's third book, Figuring Shit Out: Love, Laughter, Suicide, and Survival (2014, Behler Publications), is a memoir of the year following...

FIGURING SHIT OUT Amy Biancolli's third book, Figuring Shit Out: Love, Laughter, Suicide, and Survival (2014, Behler Publications), is a memoir of the year following her...

When I was locked in a psychiatric hospital, I wasn't able to have much of a conversation with my parents about what was going on. Phone calls were tense and filled with silence, and as I stood at the ward payphone I was so confused and frozen in fear that each call just confirmed to them how lost I was. Every day as a patient centered around the various prescriptions I was on, and like so many people suffering in a psychosis, helping me became a wait to "find the right combination of medications."

On Madness Radio, Will Hall interviews psychotherapist and author Tim Dreby about his experiences with both external world and internal world encounters with secret...

In Paris today we have a lot of people mouthing words that come easily: "Je Suis Charlie." For anyone who wants to be Charlie, who wants to get to know what modern politics is all about, by feeling it in your marrow, try reporting an adverse event on treatment to your doctor. Outside your doctor’s surgery/clinic/ consultation room you can believe you are operating in a democracy. Inside the room you may be treated with courtesy and apparent friendliness but you are being treated in an arrangement set in place to police addicts. This is not a domain in which ideals of Liberty, Equality or Fraternity are welcome.

Psychiatry is fast approaching a death spiral which we as a society may not be able to recover from. In many residencies, psychotherapy is not even being taught. Many psychotherapists of all professions – psychiatric, psychologists, and social workers have been intimidated by specious neuro-biochemical theories, while others have simply given up. And now, there aren’t many remaining good therapists in practice anymore.

In JAMA, several Texas medical doctors and health information experts discuss the rapidly expanding number of "medical scribes" being hired by physicians to enter medical information into electronic health records (EHRs). Many doctors are finding electronic health records to be inefficient and unhelpful, they write, yet governments continue to mandate them.

So here we go again; another meeting with another young person who describes how he is in an acute crisis - you may call it - and is diagnosed and prescribed neuroleptics. He is told by the doctor that he suffers from a life-long illness and he will from now on be dependent on his “medication.” As long as people are met this way I see no alternative than showing that there are alternatives. If that means being "antipsychiatry," then I am more than happy to define myself and our work in that way.

It is generally recognized in antipsychiatry circles that antidepressant drugs induce manic or hypomanic episodes in some of the individuals who take them. Psychiatry's usual response to this is to assert that the individual must have had an underlying latent bipolar disorder that has "emerged" in response to the improvement in mood. The problem with such a notion is that it is fundamentally unverifiable.

What are the philosophical underpinnings for what constitutes evidence and how have quantitative approaches so effectively trumped qualitative approaches in applied psychiatry, psychology, and the like? Furthermore, is it possible that quantitative ways of studying human experience may actually promote constricted, myopic views that hurt or oppress human beings? And how does this contribute to a global biopharmaceutical research enterprise reframing the understandable reactions to oppression as being the deficiencies and impairments of its victims?

In Medscape, three psychiatrists discuss the new definitions in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders for grief, complicated grief, depression and major depression, and try to explain how to reliably distinguish between them all.

A 1995 issue of Aisling Magazine ran an essay by philosopher Ivan Illich that challenged our society's growing psychological dependence on the health care system. "(S)ome of us today have come to believe that we desperately need packages, commodities, all under the label of "health", all designed and delivered by a system of professionalised services," wrote Illich. "Some try to convince us that an infant is born, not only helpless needing the loving care of a household, but also sick requiring specialised treatment by self-certified experts."

The two most popular interventions for ADHD are drugs and stringent control. Those who believe in the traditional biological determinist view assert that others must provide the control that people diagnosed with ADHD lack. In this treatment protocol, diagnosed individuals are remanded into treatment that mimics institutional care (i.e., others control their access to resources and their behavior is restrained with drugs). While both of these impositions can yield some short-term benefits, they can also produce unwanted side effects much like what happens when there is incarceration

The French non-profit organization Prescrire has produced a special report about the impacts of SSRI antidepressants on male fertility.

Brain Pickings offers its list of its own best articles of 2014, including a discussion of Kierkegaard's 1847 treatise on bullying, a re-analysis of Virginia Woolf's suicide letter, and an exploration of "the art of living wide."

The British Psychological Society's Research Digest examines a recent study that found that certain higher ratings of intelligence in people seemed to be correlated with higher ratings of anxiety and rumination as well.

Atul Gawande is a physician author whose work has been published in The New Yorker, among other places. In his most recent book, Being Mortal, he explores the complexity of end of life care. In this blog I discuss why I found this book relevant to Mad In America.

It took coming off psychotropic drugs completely for me to become awake. I had the doctor I was seeing wean me off, though she didn’t want to (instead she suggested I take different drugs.) But here I am almost two years later and I am feeling all of my emotions and managing them well. I knew best what I needed, and I trusted myself. Life has shown me that I can endure many trials and tribulations without giving up, and I trust myself today to reach out for help if I need it.

In NPR's Cosmos & Culture blog, philosopher Alva Noë discusses how we see colors, and uses it as an introduction to the efforts of...

Corrine A. Taylor shares her story at www.theProject321.com for awareness, empowerment and change toward living a well life after experiencing trauma. Having used psychiatric services unsuccessfully for...

Do you still need your psychiatric diagnosis? The answer for practical purposes is probably ‘Yes.’ In the current system, diagnosis is essential for accessing services and benefits and, particularly in the USA, for covering your treatment costs. But do you need to believe in your diagnosis? Do you have to accept this particular attempt to explain your difficulties, and to take it on as part of your identity by becoming one of the ‘mentally ill’? since psychiatric diagnoses have been admitted to be non-valid even by the people who drew them up, professionals should not be offering people the ‘choice’ of describing their difficulties in diagnostic terms in the first place. That would still leave people with the right to adopt whatever explanation suits them as private individuals.

When I was a psychiatric resident in 1971, the treatment for schizophrenia and manic-depression seemed to be very promising. The hopeful period of deinstitutionalization had just begun. It seemed like we were turning the corner. We were emptying out the state hospitals. And let me tell you, they really were snake pits. And the promise was that patients would return to the community. There they would have individual and family therapy; housing; assistance with working; and help with activities of daily living, when necessary. Finally, an enlightened age... finally.

In the New York Times, Natasha Singer discusses last year's launch by the Samaritans of an app that allowed people to track others' mental...