A Remarkable Feat: A Psychiatric Patient Changed the Law on Restraints
The case of Silas Dam obliged the Danish government to increase rights for psychiatric patients subjected to belt restraints.
Much of U.S. Healthcare Is Broken: How to Fix It (Chapter 1, Part 1)
On the difference between basing a medical system on clinical belief versus one based on scientific evidence.
Decolonizing Psychiatry in Pakistan: A Reckoning with our Colonial Past and a Call for...
Psychiatrist Yousaf Raza details the problems with psychiatric health care in Pakistan and shows how to find a way forward.
The Drug Taper Paradox
When we look to pills to solve one problem, we forget the opponent processes the body will naturally employ to return to homeostasis.
The Lie That Antidepressants Protect Against Suicide Is Deadly
Antidepressants do not protect against suicide. According to placebo-controlled trials, they double the risk of suicide.
Much of U.S. Healthcare Is Broken: How to Fix It (Preface)
Medical practitioners base their practice on clinical experience, rather than the sound published health research, which they distrust.
Pigs in the Hospital: The Collapse of Venezuela’s Mental Health System
The directors of the hospital, considering the empty spaces provided by its lack of services, decided to allow “milicianos” to move in, along with their pigs.
Psychiatry, Violence, and the State: California’s Systematic Failure of Its Unhoused Population
California has decided to systematically restrain, incarcerate, forcibly strip, and drug its now sizable unhoused population.
Withdrawing From Psychiatric Drugs: How to Produce Smaller Doses Than Those the Drug Companies...
Peter Gøtzsche: To reduce the risk of withdrawal symptoms, it is necessary to respect the form of the binding curve.
The Psychiatric Diagnostic Evaluation: Medical Expertise or Smoke And Mirrors?
Even though psychiatrists don't use any medical knowledge when making diagnoses, they do have MD degrees, and that's enough.
Over-stressing Stress: American Psychological Association Report Omits Oppression
Despite noting financial problems, global conflict, and climate crisis, the report was on how individuals could work on their own stress.
The New WHO and UN Guidance: Psychiatry Must Entirely Change
According to the preeminent health and rights bodies in the world, the WHO and the UN, psychiatry has to change entirely.
How the Psychosocial Approach Provides an Alternative to the Biomedical Model
The biomedical model ignores the social context in which mental distress exists, despite a large body of evidence of that link.
Why Do Only Some People Experience Severe Antidepressant Withdrawal?
Much of the vulnerability to antidepressant withdrawal may be related not to bipolar disorder, but a trait called “bipolarity.”
Critical Psychiatry Textbook, Chapter 16: Is There Any Future for Psychiatry? (Part Six)
In the final blog in Peter Gøtzsche's series, he presents his concluding thoughts and suggestions for the future of psychiatry.
I Secret Shopped #988 and Three Cop Cars Showed Up Outside My House
Although it professes to divert calls away from carceral responses, #988 may actually be increasing involuntary interventions.
The Challenge of Presenting Antidepressant Risks and Benefits
Two goals are in direct conflict for doctors when it comes to antidepressant prescriptions: fully informed consent versus maximizing placebo value.
Critical Psychiatry Textbook, Chapter 16: Is There Any Future for Psychiatry? (Part Five)
Discussing how psychiatric drugs lead to a more chronic course for depression and psychosis.
Madness and Method: Exploring the Realm of Unconventional Reasoning
What if madness isn’t a defective form of reasoning, but a distinctive style of reasoning?
Healing From Psychiatric Drug Harm, Part 2: Rational Approaches to Recovery
How do I want to live with what happened? I can't change the past, but I can choose how to move forward, focusing on progress, not perfection.
Medication-free Ward in Tromsø, Norway May Soon Close
The Tromsø ward has shown that offering patients the option to forgo psychiatric medication, or to taper from the drugs, can be a successful model of care.
Antidepressant Withdrawal: A Clinician’s Middle View
In the debate about antidepressant withdrawal, I present a middle ground, where the views of both sides are understood to have origins in wanting to help people.
Critical Psychiatry Textbook, Chapter 16: Is There Any Future for Psychiatry? (Part Four)
On the failures of the publicly funded long-term studies and psychiatry’s fraudulent reporting of these results.
The American Journal of Psychiatry’s Answer to MIA: A Silence that Speaks Volumes
The American Journal of Psychiatry will not be retracting the fraudulent STAR*D study.
The War on Suicide Is Making Things Worse
While allegedly intended to help, institutionalizing people against their will does more harm than good. Psychiatric coercion is dehumanizing.
