It’s In Your Head: Why Reducing All Problems to ‘Mental Health Issues’ Hurts Humanity
From RT: The framing of an increasing array of social issues in mental health terms raises important questions about how we are being asked to think about the problems that face us.
Why The C in C-PTSD Will Haunt You
From Gemini Adams: Unlike PTSD, the symptoms of CPTSD are often entrenched in an individual's personality, having taken root during formative years, when attachment styles and brain development are fragile and still maturing.
Concerning Forgiveness: The Liberating Experience of Facing Painful Truth | Alice Miller
From alice-miller.com: It is precisely the opposite of forgiveness – namely, rebellion against mistreatment suffered, the recognition and condemnation of our parents’ misleading opinions and actions, and the articulation of our own needs – that ultimately frees us from the past.
Why Albuquerque’s Latest Experiment in Policing Involves Social Workers, Not Officers
From Christian Science Monitor: The city has become one of the first to push public safety in a new direction with its new stand-alone Community Safety department.
MH Services in England Are Being ‘Uberised’ – That’s Bad for Patients & Therapists
From The Conversation: A standardized and digitalized model of therapy called Increased Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) - England's largest NHS program - is causing therapist depression, anxiety and burnout.
By Tracing Addiction (and More) to Childhood Trauma, Can We Find Compassion?
From YES! Magazine: "Trauma is an overwhelming threat that you don’t know how to deal with," says Dr. Gabor Maté. "Our job, as human beings, is to learn from our suffering."
He Cheered on Britney Spears—While Fighting a Guardianship Battle of His Own
From The Washington Post: The aftershocks of #FreeBritney could continue to rattle the American legal system long after Spears’s victory.
NHS to Give Therapy for Depression Before Medication Under New Guidelines
From The Guardian: Draft guidance says a "menu of treatment options" including CBT, exercise and mindfulness should be offered in less severe cases.
NC Pays Psychiatric Units That Break Rules Millions to ‘Care’ for Youth
Around the Web: A newspaper investigation discovered that the state continued to pay psychiatric residential treatment facilities millions when they repeatedly broke rules meant to ensure children's safety and well-being.
Punching, Predators, Neglect: Traumatized NC Children Suffer Inside Dismal Psychiatric Centers
From The Fayetteville Observer: "We are ruining people’s lives, and we’re doing it in the most expensive way possible," said State Rep. Verla Insko. "It’s inhumane and irresponsible. It is a government failure."
A Peer-Run Center in North Carolina Offers Alternative for Psychiatric Care
From NBC: At Retreat @ the Plaza, guests use their experiences with 'mental illness,' homelessness and domestic violence to help one another regain their footing.
Family Deeds: Constellation Therapy & Generations of Trauma
From Psychology Today: Family and ancestral constellation is a therapeutic tool that allows the invisible influences from the present and past to be made visible, acknowledged, and whole.
Top ‘ADHD Experts’ All Take Drug Company Money
From ADHD is BS: All of the world's ten most influential 'ADHD experts' take funds from multiple ADHD drug manufacturers. Topping the list is American psychologist Prof Stephen V. Faraone who has commercial ties to 21 ADHD drug companies.
How CBT Harmed Me: The Interview That the New York Times Erased
From Disability Visibility Project: CBT as a modality is based around gaslighting. It's about telling a patient that the world is safe, bad feelings are temporary, and that pain is a 'faulty or unhelpful' distortion of thinking.
‘At the Forefront of Medicine’: My UChicago Involuntary Hospitalization
From The Chicago Maroon: A neuroscience student reflects on the psychiatric system’s failure to care for its patients--and how it can often make matters worse.
How Emotional Blindness Is Created – 21 Points by Alice Miller
From alice-miller.com: The renowned Swiss psychotherapist summarized the way repressed early maltreatment leads to chronic emotional disconnectivity.
APA Apologizes for Longstanding Contributions to Systemic Racism & Human Hierarchy
From the American Psychological Association: "The APA failed in its role leading the discipline of psychology, was complicit in contributing to systemic inequities, and hurt many through racism, racial discrimination, and denigration of people of color, thereby falling short on its mission to benefit society and improve lives."
Remembering Dorothea Buck—Who Forced Psychiatry To Confront Its Deadly History
From Ms. Magazine: After being force-sterilized and tortured by psychiatry as a young woman, Buck fought fiercely, speaking out against both psychiatric abuse and the way medicine defines schizophrenia and psychosis.
Health Insurers Need to Reimburse Medication Tapering Strips
From IIPDW: Reimbursing tapering strips that help patients taper medication will save a lot of suffering and death, yet health insurers refuse to do so.
“Mama”: A Woman and Her Chimpanzees Heal Together After Trauma
From The New Yorker: In Pablo de la Chica's short film "Mama," a caregiver at a chimpanzee sanctuary and the orphaned chimps she cares for—both victims of the ongoing conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo—help each other heal.
To Minimize Medication Withdrawal, Taper Slowly
From Psychiatric News: “There is an urgent need to develop official guidelines for how to safely taper psychotropics”—for both patients and physicians, says Mark Horowitz, MD.
How Public Health Took Part in Its Own Downfall
From The Atlantic: As the 20th century progressed, the field moved away from the idea that social reforms were a necessary part of preventing disease and willingly silenced its own political voice.
How Hunter-Gatherers Maintained Their Egalitarian Ways | Peter Gray, PhD
From Psychology Today: One anthropologist after another has been amazed by the degree of equality, individual autonomy, indulgent treatment of children, cooperation, and sharing in the hunter-gatherer culture that he or she studied.
Adverse Childhood Relationship Experiences: The Most Underestimated Risk Factor for Chronic Illness
From Chronic Illness Trauma Studies: The impact of one of the ACEs (adverse childhood experiences) in particular - emotional neglect - is huge and underrecognized.
A Racial Disparity in Schizophrenia Diagnoses in Nursing Homes
From The New York Times: Experts say some facilities are using a schizophrenia loophole to continue sedating dementia patients, and the impact has been more severe for Black residents.
