Around The Web

In this piece for Medium, activist and survivor Louisa J. Harvey describes the experience of being locked in a psychiatric institution on an involuntary hold. "This is not...

From The Advocate: "Phillip Newton, interim president of Local 1695 at AFSCME Council 17, said the outbreak began early last week and administrators were...

From Flipboard: In a recent study on auditory hallucinations, all participants — not just those who had been diagnosed with psychosis — experienced conditioned hallucinations. The study...

An article in Truthout asserts that "Since all human occurrences take place in society, it is obviously a truism that all insanity must, in...

From Financial Times: "So far, clinicians have most commonly used VR for exposure therapy — for example, putting a person with a fear of heights...

From The Guardian: Conceptualizing emotional distress or suffering as the result of a biological, genetic illness may be stigmatizing and inaccurate, and may lead to...

Psychiatric Times has published a discussion of the research comparing the effectiveness of antidepressant medications under different conditions. “First, there seem to be no...

From MinnPost: "More than a third of adults in the United States may be taking prescription medications that have depression or suicidal thoughts as...

From Medscape: The mental health system must step up to assuage fears and anxieties around the rapidly spreading COVID-19 pandemic.

From ProPublica: The move raises questions about the future of the hospital and of the hundreds of children in state care who are kept there.

In a recent rodent study out of Rutgers University, researchers found elevated stress hormones and reduced learning and maternal behaviors in female rodents who...

In this piece for The Independent, Rachel Waddingham describes her experience with hearing voices as well as learning to live with and understand her voices. "When...

From The New York Times: Two major study retractions in one month have left researchers wondering if the peer review process is broken.

From CounterPunch: The public has routinely heard proclamations that depression is a neurobiological phenomenon or brain disease, but recent major research reviews refute these claims.

From the San Francisco Chronicle: San Francisco city officials are hoping to change the law that allows homeless individuals with mental health diagnoses to stay on...

-Swaab Attorneys reviews Australian case law to examine when an employer can force an employee to provide medical evidence or submit to a psychiatric evaluation.

From The Thoughtful Counselor: MIA Science Writer and Blogs Editor Peter Simons questions the scientific methods and clinical utility of biological explanations for mental distress in a podcast interview with The Thoughtful Counselor.

From The Washington Post: A new investigative report on deterrents in reporting problems with human research found evidence of fear of retaliation among whistleblowers in...

From USA TODAY: "You may be really destroying these kids emotionally and mentally... Some of these kids may not be able to recover."

Writing for the Atlantic, David Dobbs examines how much harm has been done in the 14 years since Paxil was wrongly determined to be safe and effective. “Study 329, as it became known, helped spur a huge increase in Paxil prescriptions,” Dobbs writes. “In 2002 alone, over 2 million prescriptions were written for children and teens, and many more for adults.” “Thousands of children, teens, and young adults attempted or committed suicide while on Paxil,” and the reanalysis of Study 329 in BMJ makes it seem “more likely than ever” that many did because of the drug.

Writing for GreenBiz, Elizabeth Grossman reports on research on the increasing amounts of pharmaceuticals making their way into the environment. “They report on opiods, amphetamines and other pharmaceuticals found in treated drinking water; antibiotics in groundwater capable of altering naturally occurring bacterial communities; and over-the-counter and prescription drugs found in water leeching from municipal landfills.”

MIT Press has released Hallucination: Philosophy and Psychology, a collection of both scientific and philosophical essays co-edited by University of Glasgow's Fiona Macpherson, co-director...

Allen Frances writes in the Huffington Post that "DSM-5 certainly deserves rejecting. It offers a reckless hodgepodge of new diagnoses that will misidentify normals...

For NPR’s 13.7: Cosmos and Culture blog, philosopher Alva Noë comments on a new Oxford journal, Neuroscience of Consciousness. He is skeptical of the persistent tendency of some neuroscientists “to think of consciousness itself as a neural phenomenon.” His own view, he writes “is that the brain is only part of the story, and that we can only begin to understand how the brain makes us consciousness by realizing that brain functions only in the setting of our bodies and our broader environmental (including our social and cultural) situation.”

Students from Harvard Medical School joined students from Tufts University to protest Joseph DiMasi, who recently published a study that the students claim is...