Get Out of the Explain Lane
From Benzo Brains: When you’re broken, it’s too hard to carry both yourself and others by explaining, pleading or arguing. Save your energy for the journey instead.
Psychiatry and the Shores of Social Construction: Sami Timimi, MD
From Psychiatric Times: Awais Aftab interviews Dr. Sami Timimi on his latest book, Insane Medicine: How the Mental Health Industry Creates Damaging Treatment Traps and How You Can Escape Them.
What Happens to Your Mental Health When You Can’t Pay Your Rent?
From The New York Times: There is no one cause for any suicide. But research shows that there is a connection between people’s ability to pay rent each month and their mental health.
COVID-19 and Mental Health: Feeling Anguish Is Normal and Is Not a Disorder
From The Conversation: Medicalizing emotional suffering doesn’t address the source of our anguish or help us find meaning in our own experiences—something that is essential to our capacity to cope and adapt.
Why Mental Health Researchers Are Studying Psychedelics All Wrong
From Salon: The rigidity of reductive clinical research belies the organic and expansive nature of the psychedelic experience.
Massachusetts Residents Urged to Support Informed Consent Bill for Benzodiazepine Use
Ongoing until April 1st: The Benzodiazepine Information Coalition is asking ALL Massachusetts residents to write their legislators and ask them to co-sign The Benzo Bill, HD.285/ SD.1370.
Madness Network News – Call for Writing and Art! Submissions Due Mar. 30
Madness Network News is looking for writing and art submissions from psychiatric survivors, mad people, inmates and ex-inmates.
Why Is Electroshock ‘Therapy’ Still a Mainstay of Psychiatry?
From Aeon: Even before knowing the research on ECT, I’d had a gut reaction, as a young psychiatric nursing aide, that something was dreadfully wrong.
Brain Imaging Study Paused After LGBTQ+ Advocates Complain
From MedPage Today: Ezak Perez of Gender Justice LA said the "research design unapologetically aims to cause mental health distress to trigger 'dysphoria' to an already marginalized and vulnerable community."
College Tuition Sparked a Mental Health Crisis. Then the Hospital Bill Arrived.
From KHN: A student from Mumbai with an interest in comedy discovers that college tuition, hospital bills, and psychiatric treatment are all very bad jokes in America.
Mental Health Is a Political Problem
From Tribune: Mental health is often framed in individual terms with individual solutions – but rising levels of depression, anxiety and stress across society make it clear that we need political answers.
Human Rights Abused on Mental Health Wards
From the Morning Star: Ruth Hunt looks at how excessive medication and violence have become part and parcel of "mental health treatment."
Antioch, CA, Police Murder Man in Mental Crisis by Kneeling on His Neck for...
From CNN: When Antioch police officers arrived, they made no attempt to understand the situation and immediately grabbed Quinto from his mother's arms, the family's lawyer said.
No Officers Indicted in Death of Daniel Prude, a Black Man Pinned and Hooded...
From The Washington Post: A medical examiner ruled Prude’s death a homicide, and experts say officers neglected to use known tactics for helping people in crisis while arresting the 41-year-old man.
The Darker Story Just Outside the Lens of ‘Framing Britney Spears’
From The New Republic: The documentary and #FreeBritney movement treat the pop star’s conservatorship as strange and exceptional. The truth is much more troubling.
In Brattleboro, a New Kind of Police Patrol Offers Addiction Treatment, Not Jail
From SentinelSource.com: Looking for alternatives to arrest, police departments in Brattleboro and elsewhere are using their 24/7 presence and regular contact with drug users to refer them to treatment and other resources.
More Parents Seek ADHD Diagnosis and Drugs for Kids to Manage Remote Learning
From NBC News: "I'm watching kids who used to love school become unenthused and unmotivated," said one Michigan-based pediatrician.
How Norway is Offering Drug-Free Treatment to People With Psychosis
From the BBC: In Norway, the government has taken decisive action to try and improve the lives of people with psychosis by giving them more power over their lives.
Madness, Disability, and Abolition: A Call for Movement Solidarity
From It's Going Down: When we consider the horrors of the mental health industry, we should ask ourselves the same questions we ask of prisons and police. Can the system be “reformed,” or is it rotten to the core?
Denver Program That Replaces Cops With Counselors Is Reducing Arrests
From Denverite: The Support Team Assisted Response (STAR) program represents a more empathetic approach to policing that keeps people out of an often-cyclical criminal justice system.
A 9-Year-Old Was Pepper-Sprayed by Police. Here’s What Should Have Happened Instead
From USA TODAY: To expect a child to be able to overcome a biological stress response for the sake of compliance demonstrates a lack of understanding, said child advocate Deb Rosen.
A New Tool in Treating ‘Mental Illness’: Building Design
From The New York Times: New research into the health effects of our surroundings is spurring the development of facilities that feel more residential.
Psychologists Should Now Lead the Call to Close Guantánamo
From Psychology Today: Calling for the permanent closure of Guantánamo would be an important milestone in the APA's fraught journey to reset its moral compass.
Parting the Clouds | Charles Raison on New Treatments for Depression
From The Sun: Many "new" treatments for depression have been a part of human cultures for millennia: compassion meditation, sweat lodges, fasting, and psychedelics like psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms.
They Called for Help. They’d Always Regret It.
From The Atlantic: Two families called 911 to get help for their sons. They didn’t know that they’d be thrusting them into a complex and often brutal system.
