MIA Today

Empathy concept with nurturing hands reaching down to sustain a sad young woman in deep depression sitting under a thunder cloud with crying emoticons, vector illustration

The Roots of Emotional Illness: Emotional Conditioning

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Psychodynamic psychotherapy gets at the root cause of the emotional distress—a person’s emotional conditioning in childhood.

Something Broken: My Mother’s Story

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The use of psychiatry against women who have experienced male violence is a form of control. It silences women and maintains the status quo.
A male doctor appears to scream in frustration. His glasses catch the light

Are Psychiatrists More Mad Than Their Patients?

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Misconceptions among psychiatric leaders are at variance with the scientific evidence. They suffer from a serious, collective delusion.

Death in a Bottle: My 24-Year Battle with Benzodiazepines

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I’m not even taking Klonopin because it helps me. I’m taking Klonopin so I don’t go through withdrawal from Klonopin. That’s the trap.

And You Thought They Were Side Effects: How Psychiatry Turned Chemical Disruption Into Medical Treatment

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There’s no cure beneath the disruption, just a chemical hit that alters perception or behavior.
Photo of young woman in a therapy group

The Quiet Crisis in Mental Health: The Medicalization and Deskilling of Psychotherapy

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The focus on the "worried well" and the exclusion of the "mad" serves to legitimize psychiatric control and surveillance.

Art, Poetry, and Humor Galleries

View the artwork, poetry, and humor galleries and submit your work. Or visit the Arts Corner.A colorful painting of two women, one wearing a hooded jacket and seated on a stool, picking at the hair of one sitting on the floor.Split by Ashley Nightingale

Rebecca Williams from University of Manchester is seeking participants for research on what potential participants want to know about psychedelic-assisted therapies. If you are interested in taking part, please contact  [email protected].
Dr. Morgan Shields of Washington University in St. Louis is conducting research on the experience of people utilizing behavioral health crisis services. They are recruiting people who have direct lived experience as patients/recipients or providers/clinicians and those with indirect experience as loved ones. If interested, take the 5-minute screening survey here.

Two Decades of PSSD: A Life Stolen by Antidepressants

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Our two-year-long collaborative research project suggests that neuroimmune processes and related downstream mechanisms may play a role in PSSD.

Kermit Cole: Dialogical Therapy and Quantum Theory Walk Into a Bar…

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On the podcast this week we are joined by Kermit Cole who shares his thoughts on how humor can help in creating a shared experience that is helpful to the healing process. Kermit, in his experiences of being with people in psychotic states, has seen humor as a moment when a connection can be made. In many ways, this project is bringing Kermit back full circle to his work as a film director, early in his professional career.
Stock photo. Man in lab coat appears to scream in anger.

Criticisms That Establishment Psychiatry Can and Cannot Tolerate

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Criticism that uniquely applies to establishment psychiatry but not to medicine in general threatens its existential legitimacy, and is not tolerated.

Chemically Imbalanced: Joanna Moncrieff on the Making and Unmaking of the Serotonin Myth

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Joanna Moncrieff joins Robert Whitaker to talk about her latest book, titled Chemically Imbalanced: The Making and Unmaking of the Serotonin Myth. They discuss the serotonin story and the fact that there is no good evidence that a serotonergic deficiency is a primary cause of depression.

The Fight Against Involuntary Commitment: Are Protection & Advocacy Organizations Fulfilling Their Mission?

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Protection and Advocacy organizations were designed as ground-breaking tools for fighting involuntary commitment and protecting patients’ rights. Are they fulfilling their promise? And will they survive Trump?

Interview with German activist Peter Lehmann: “I Lost My Fear and Gained Everything.”

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Peter Lehmann is a central figure in the struggle for emancipation and dignity of people with lived experience of psychiatric treatment.

EDITOR'S PICK

Beyond 180…some reflection

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If it is true that mental health is not psychiatry and that mental disorder is part of a distress that has its origin in a complex of factors, which in a somewhat too simplistic way are defined as bio-psycho-social, then I believe that psychiatry cannot omnipotently take charge of it but that it must find a less reductive interpretation than the currently dominant one.

Murder in Daphni

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If the dominant psychiatric paradigm does not radically change, which unfortunately has been embraced by Psychologists, Social Workers, Nurses and other professionals involved in the provision of mental health services (without this meaning that I question their humanity), the tragedy of the way we approach and treat/care for people who experience mental suffering will continue and be reproduced, and even worse, as a non-tragedy.

Are Patients Being Paid to Provide Industry Endorsements?

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My study investigates the data available in all three sources and finds that they are incomplete and inconsistent, making any conclusions about patient groups’ conflict-of-interest and funding unreliable.

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