Blogs

We still try to shove every kind of emotion into a neatly organized box, give it a label, maybe even an accompanying medicine to make it neat and predictable.

All people need to feel useful in this life.  The sense of belonging with others and being important to them is the primary need...

A few weeks ago, while I was at a birthday celebration, a friend who works in a mental health setting remarked that she was...

This is how a child gets into the mental health system. At age 3 he pitches a fit in the grocery store because he...

Critiquing the wildly popular 1994 eugenicist book, which purported to link IQ and race, by reviewing the supposed genetic evidence.

Researchers are constantly hunting for chemical variations in people with emotional problems. But even if chemical differences are someday found, why would we assume that these chemical processes cause abnormal behaviors or moods, as opposed to being mere correlates of them at the chemical level?

As stories wove together, Ron turned to the son and said, “You know, I don’t think you were ever schizophrenic at all.” There was an extended silence as this statement sunk in and the group drew closer to hear what came next. But the rain fell harder until all sound was drowned out. We sat together, feeling the rain soak into our ears, our bodies, the ground; words were unnecessary.

2018 has already brought particular attention to the pharmaceutical industry’s “profit over patient” mentality, as drug manufacturers and distributors continue to be hit with civil cases throughout the country for their involvement in the opioid epidemic. But the sad fact is that these lawsuits are nothing new.

Generally, most people, even little people, recognise that Santa is just a game. Children perhaps wholeheartedly believe in the story for a while but flaws in the narrative soon become apparent. Unfortunately, not nearly enough people recognise that the chemical imbalance is also a charade.

The National Council on Independent Living (NCIL) supports both Disability Pride Month and Mad Pride Month: Both are July!”

While any effort to generate awareness and potentially curb the benzodiazepine epidemic is commendable, we have to ask ourselves, is Xanax just the scapegoat in this situation? Will legislative action and media attention for only one benzodiazepine out of so many make any difference?

A very gifted and compassionate friend recently said that she feels enslaved to Abilify - that she has tried to taper off it several times but always ends up slipping into an extreme state, no matter how slow she tapers. She said this repeated experience makes her feel like a slave, because she has to go back on the drug to stop the very intense extreme state induced whenever she tries to stop taking it.

It falls upon us survivors to prove that we were damaged, and that we aren’t malingerers or attention hounds or “mentally ill”— if we have any energy amidst the maelstrom to plead our case. Because if we don’t, we risk having our narratives rewritten by others’ “good intentions,” misinformed though they may be by the mainstream narrative. People get weird and pushy about this stuff, both because suffering is ugly and because our truth threatens their worldview.

Everyone and every group working for mental health justice ought to make fighting global warming a priority right now. Of course, the whole disability movement, and in fact all sentient beings should be concerned about climate crisis, but those of us working for human rights and more choices for mental wellness have special reasons to make this planetary catastrophe a unifying theme for all of us.

While making money from the publication of pharmaceutical company trials, and in the face of a complete failure by industry to adhere to basic scientific norms and make data available, BMJ and other journals — although BMJ in particular — have run a series of articles on supposed Academic Fraud. These articles feature instances of fraud sometimes as bizarre as researcher claiming he cannot show the data as it was eaten by termites. The universal feature is that these are academic studies, and academic fraud is an issue in academia.

A national study showed that ADHD drug abuse among U.S. high and middle school students has been rising for the past 20 years.

In his Daily Show, political satirist Jon Stewart spoke recently about various LGBT issues, including current efforts of Texas Republicans to endorse the practice of reparative therapy − or, as it's also sometimes called, "pray away the gay" therapy. In an effort to qualify some of the techniques used by reparative therapists, Stewart quoted an Op-Ed that I wrote in 2012 for the magazine The Advocate about my own experiences undergoing a form of reparative therapy with a psychiatrist in Canada.

When I first read Anatomy of an Epidemic in 2010, something inside of me ignited.  I had no idea that such a sensation was...

On the pharmaceutical industry's spinning of results of clinical trials to hide suicide attempts and deaths on depression pills.

What does it tell us about the current state of psychiatry when some of the biggest names in the psychiatric establishment are now distancing themselves from psychiatry’s diagnostic system and its treatments? The institution of psychiatry has become corrupted by Big Pharma to such a degree that it has become, even to the mainstream media, so obviously ridiculous and so dangerously insane that politically astute psychiatrists are trying to separate themselves from their institution.

As many readers of Anatomy of an Epidemic know, I spoke at a psychiatric Grand Rounds at Massachusetts General Hospital on January 13, 2011....

Partners' comment in response to my Carrie Fisher article essentially consists of unsubstantiated assertions, non sequiturs, and appeals to psychiatric authority. Because it comes from, and presumably represents the views of, an extremely large psychiatric practice, it warrants a close look.

Despite the UN’s strong stance against involuntary treatment, many countries continue to uphold legislation that encourages it.

There are a number of well-recognised problems with this sort of study and we should be very cautious about accepting its conclusions at face value. The main problem is that it is an ‘observational’ study, not a randomised controlled trial, and these analyses can be seriously misleading. 

In 1980, the British Medical Journal published a “Systematic Review of the Benzodiazepines” by the Committee on the Review of Medicines. The committee denied the addictive potential of Benzodiazepines and limited their suggestions to short term use. The results have been devastating.