‘NHS Sends Too Many MH Patients to Hospital for Expensive, Ineffective Care’
From The Bristol Cable: People are being sent away to private mental health providers for specialist treatment, but this often means poorer outcomes at higher costs, says occupational therapist Keir Harding.
IFS: The Revolutionary Treatment That Could Change Psychotherapy Forever
From Elemental: "If it is true that these things we think of as our inner enemies are really heroes stuck in time, that allows people to relate inside with a lot more compassion and love."
Trading Cops for Social Workers Isn’t the Solution to Police Violence
From Truthout: Social workers have a long and troubled history as partners to the state, more often serving as carceral enforcers than as collaborators toward liberation.
Dozens of ECT Patients Sue NHS Over Brain Damage Claims
From The Daily Mail: They say they were never informed that ECT could cause permanent memory loss as well as trouble with basic tasks like facial recognition, walking, and reading.
On Addiction: ‘You Just Need a Hand to Hold to See You Through’
From The BMJ Opinion: The enduring judgments around addiction in our society have long been a problem. But I hadn’t expected to face this even within healthcare services.
Natives Foster Happy People Without Overthinking
From Psychology Today: Jean Liedloff's 1975 book The Continuum Concept: In Search of Happiness Lost revealed how native groups in the Amazon intuitively raised healthy and intelligent adults.
The Importance of Having a Breakdown
From The School of Life: Our crisis, if we can get through it, is an attempt to dislodge us from a toxic status quo and an insistent call to rebuild our lives on a more authentic and sincere basis.
The Quality of Monopoly Capitalist Society: Mental Health
From Monthly Review: What Baran and Sweezy saw in the 1960s as the trend toward the psychological dissolution of working-class families and individuals has today become nothing less than a ubiquitous cancer responsible for the decline of whole communities.
Why Grooming Is So Hard to Spot: The Truth
From the VictimFocus Blog: Grooming should be reframed as a common, normal human behaviour that we all engage in. That's why teaching children and women to "spot the signs" doesn't work.
NZ: Homeless Most Likely to be Fed Antidepressants When Seeking Help
From Stuff: Again and again, homeless people tell their story to officials and agencies. The most common thing they get back, new research suggests, is a script for anti-depressants.
Police Keep Using ‘Excited Delirium’ to Justify Brutality. It’s Junk Science.
From The Washington Post: Several analyses have found that the majority of deaths attributed to 'excited delirium' are associated with the use of physical restraint.
Overdose Deaths Soar Across Country Amid COVID-19 Pandemic
From The Appeal: "COVID-19 really highlights the risk factors [for deaths of despair] that we know are most prevalent: unemployment, social isolation, disconnection. Those are huge risk factors."
Let’s Avoid Talk of ‘Chemical Imbalance’: It’s People in Distress
From Psyche: Mental health treatment needs to re-engage with the language of persons. This means suspending the detached, third-person stance toward patients, and attending to their actual experience and circumstances.
Drugs, Money and Misleading Evidence
From Nature: It’s time to take trials out of the hands of pharmaceutical makers, argues the latest in a long line of books on corruption and the pharmaceutical industry.
Medical Chief Savages Royal Adelaide Hospital Shackle Use
From The Advertiser: The state's Chief Psychiatrist issued an intervention order demanding the $2.4 billion hospital reduce use of restraints and seclusion on mental-health patients stuck in the emergency department.
People in Mental Health Crises Need Help, Not Handcuffs
From STAT News: A mental health crisis can be a frightening thing. Those in its throes need help, but all too often get handcuffs
Cops Criminalize Protest; Psychiatrists Medicalize It
From Susan Rosenthal: It doesn’t help to replace one form of oppression with another. Like the police, the ‘mental health industry’ is built on discrimination.
RCMP Officer Drags Student in Crisis, Steps on Her Head
From CBC: Wang says she was experiencing mental distress and her boyfriend called the RCMP. The officer did not provide assistance.
The Pandemic Claims New Victims: Prestigious Medical Journals
From The New York Times: Two major study retractions in one month have left researchers wondering if the peer review process is broken.
‘Bear Our Pain’: The Plea for More Black Mental Health Workers
From NPR: Dr Rhea Boyd says racism's toll threads through the psyche, manifesting in many ways, and shaping the youngest of brains.
Professionals and ECT Recipients Request Suspension of ECT in NHS
From The University of East London: They hope that by this time next year, the UK will be the first country to finally put an end to this well-intentioned but calamitous error.
Bias in Clinical Algorithms Make Health Disparities Worse
From The Lown Institute: Because of bias that exists in many clinical algorithms, doctors are unintentionally giving people of color worse treatment.
The Battle for the Soul of Psychiatry: Ronald W. Pies, MD
From Psychiatric Times: Dr. Aftab and Dr. Pies revisit various criticisms of psychiatry, and discuss the profession’s relationship with its critics.
Psychiatric Disorders as an Imperfect Community: Peter Zachar, PhD
From Psychiatric Times: In this interview, Dr. Aftab discusses how psychiatric disorders can be viewed as an "imperfect community."
Drug-Drug Interactions Could Imperil COVID-19 Treatment
From Undark: Some of the most commonly prescribed medications can have strong and sometimes dangerous interactions with some experimental COVID-19 therapies.
