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The concepts we use have undermined our natural resilience, sensitised us to an idea of our vulnerability, and encouraged us to transfer our agency to practitioners who use a system as if it has scientific validity and is clinically useful.

Public mental health authorities continue to oppress persons with psychosocial conditions through a combination of punitive and discriminatory laws that are constructed with a "best interests" paradigm in mind and a medical model that pathologises difference and dissent. 

Please join us on Friday, October 23 for OpenExcellence, HOPENDialogue, and Mad in America’s ongoing Town Hall conversation about what Open Dialogue is — and is becoming.

If academic psychiatry is evidence-based, why did it take two decades to recognize SSRI withdrawal as widespread and chronic among patients?

Some suicidal people may only benefit from the extraordinary selflessness and profound empathy demonstrated by St. Paul to his jailer. Credentials don’t measure for that.

Yes, we need to drastically reform the foundational assumptions that govern the ideologies that pervade our systems, but many now know the truth about what is happening, and transformational approaches have been sprouting up organically in the rich soils of human creativity.

I went to the children’s ward, to work with the kids. I remembered to tell all of them that I had been locked up my whole childhood on psych wards, and this always made them trust me.

This year, I finally got that first major speaking invitation: One of the four keynoters in the largest gathering each year for mental health consumers and psychiatric survivors, Peerpocalypse.

A recent Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article and a recent American Psychiatric Association (APA) press release reveal the power the APA has wielded through its various DSM editions in pathologizing the effects of trauma.

Joanna Moncrieff reflects on what has and has not changed in the field of psychiatric drug treatment in the years between the first and newly published second edition of the Straight Talking Introduction to Psychiatric Drugs.

The history of antidepressant withdrawal dates to the first articles on imipramine in the late 1950s. It is useful to compare discussion of both generations of psychiatric drugs and focus on shared efforts to deny and minimize their withdrawal syndromes.

I don’t drink or smoke. I’ve never taken any drugs till four years ago. Yet today, my life revolves around psychedelic medicines—heavily stigmatized substances still illegal in this country and most others across the world. How did this happen?

To those who say that major scientific/medical advances since 1975 have made going to a biological psychiatrist a rational choice, I say: What advances? 45 years have passed: Is any psychiatric “diagnosis” now verified by lab test, x-ray, or physical exam finding?

I started to wonder, “How many medications does it take to get sober?” In fact, the biggest correlation I’ve noticed with relapse and overdose is the amount of psychiatric medications being prescribed.

Suffering can be altered when people learn how to respond differently to their pain. This is the principle behind mindfulness-based stress reduction, which was designed to incorporate Buddhist practices into chronic pain treatment.

This piece is the second of a two-part essay about suicide, diagnosis, what doesn't help, and what does help. This part is about barriers to seeking help and about the ways we actually can be of help to people who are considering suicide.

This piece is the first of a two-part essay about suicide, diagnosis, what doesn't help, and what does help. This part is about suicide, diagnosis, and some of what fails to help.

A dialogue between Nev Jones and Sandy Steingard about Mad in America, critics of psychiatry, medication for psychosis, Open Dialogue, and the need for racial and class justice.

The Vice article was presented as an exploration of the “movement against psychiatry,” and yet you can see, once it is deconstructed, how it told a story that surely pleased the promoters of the conventional narrative, and put the “critics” on the defensive at almost every turn.

The American Psychological Association has proposed sweeping changes to training, focusing on the behavioral health model, which reduces the complexity of the human experience to observable behaviors.

Malcharist, by Paul John Scott, is a fictional account of one of psychiatry’s most influential key opinion leaders (KOLs), his ghostwriter, and a journalist on the trail of a big scandal in the world of Big Pharma.

It is uncomfortably difficult to look at Phoebe Sparrow Wagner’s art. That much is intentional. She shakes up the viewer’s sense of wellbeing and security so that they can better identify with the plight of the mental patient.

In part four of this series, Megan Wildhood takes on the tropes of "That's not about you," "The outer world is a reflection of your inner world," "I didn't mean to," and "Time heals all wounds."

Debunking a recent study on ADHD and COVID-19: It suffers from a series of manipulations and spins that are inappropriate in scientific research that aspires to objectivity and that aims to reveal truths.

A collective knowledge of lived experience is a straightforward answer for improving millions of lives, but it has become clear that it will take an organized community of voice-hearers and their allies to take back credibility and authorship on the narrative of our own lives.