Mad in America

STAR*D’s results are too bitter a pill for psychiatric leaders to swallow, so they have chosen to become a rogue medical specialty.

Outcome monitoring is a product of bureaucratic healthcare: Human suffering reduced to efficiency optimization.

God-like, they assured me they knew what was wrong with me and had the elixir. But their elixir was a poison.

There is no universal moral code: Elder law and the injustice and inhumane practice of legal guardianship are a calculated effort by the court, the attorneys, and the healthcare system.

In the upside-down world of psychiatry, the pills that destroy your sex life are called happy pills. I call them unhappy pills or anti-sex pills.

Liberation from pharmaceuticals is possible, but it is not an easy journey. I advocate for informed consent.

The victims of psychiatric iatrogenesis believed they were taking a vitamin, only to later realize it was poison.

The biggest injustice done to a person with such a diagnosis is to give up on them for the rest of their life.

I sought help and followed the prescribed path. About twenty years later, I began to question, "What is happening? Why am I still stuck?"

The medications are there to disconnect us from our divine, creative Self, but the human being is remarkable and incredibly resilient.

At the core of trauma is the alienation from ourselves, our bodies and our emotions caused by our modern lifestyle.

“These things we do, so others may live.” It took a small army of my brothers and sisters in and out of uniform to drag me out of my abyss.

You may forget what people did for you, but you will never forget how they made you feel.

The FAA should reconsider the policy on drugs that are ineffective for depression and increase the risk of suicidality and violence.

From my grandmother I learned about mishiguene, which means crazy in that ironic and funny tone that Yiddish can have in some families.

A Peer Support Specialist tells her story and issues a callout to the BIPOC LatinX community, advocating for change.

This is the story of a young woman who suffered through the agony of "kindling" and other drug-related harm, eventually dying by suicide. This is also the story of her mother’s path ahead.

Bureaucratic red tape often overshadows the quality of therapeutic engagement. Protocols often trump empathy, and paperwork overshadows personalized care.

I firmly believe that the people who give patients drugs have a responsibility to help people get off the drugs.

Will was plunged into an extreme state following exposure to a synthetic street drug, which led to repeat hospitalizations and psych drugs.

When images of myself climbing over the Golden Gate Bridge’s unmistakable red railing appear on the screen, questions shoot through my mind: Where did this footage come from? Why is it on TV?

Based on RCTs, antidepressants double the risk of harms related to suicidality and violence. Why do psychiatrists ignore this data?

This belief that there was something fundamentally wrong with me reinforced the damage done by repeated experiences of abuse, rejection, and discrimination.

No one is prepared to have the ability to feel attraction or fall in love taken away from them. I am incapable of what makes humans human: emotions, emotional bonding.

Your therapist is, first and foremost, a regular person. No matter how many degrees, years of training, or fancy certificates, they are still human.