Blogs

Many of us spend a lifetime avoiding our emotional pain, and it does become more and more toxic as long as we keep it buried. It will literally make us ill, physically and mentally, as Bessel Van talks about in the book, The Body Keeps Score. The little quip, "What you resist, persists" has proven very true in my life. The only way out of that trap is to stop avoiding and learn in whatever way makes sense to us as individuals to feel once again and to embrace and absorb and therefore transform the pain of our lives. This is how I am healing.

What would happen if the mental health system fully recognized the pervasive and profound impacts of trauma on their clients? How might a deeper appreciation of the multi-faceted sequelae of childhood maltreatment and toxic stressors reshape mental health services? While the implementation of trauma-informed care in mental health programs has made significant inroads, the dominant bio-reductionist model continues to constrain and undermine progress.

Twin studies supply the most frequently cited evidence in favor of important genetic influences on human behavioral differences. In an extremely small yet influential handful of studies, twin pairs were said to have been reared apart in different families. Twin researchers and others view this occurrence as the ultimate test of the relative influences of nature (genes) and nurture (environment). According to this view all behavioral resemblance between reared-apart MZ twin pairs (known as “MZA” pairs) must be the result of their 100% genetic similarity, because such pairs share no environmental similarity. But, far from being separated at birth and reared apart in randomly selected homes representing the full range of potential behavior-influencing environments, and meeting each other for the first time when studied, most MZA pairs were only partially reared apart, and grew up in similar cultural and socioeconomic environments at the same time.

Ever since I had realized how I had been so terribly wounded in my life, I had wanted to tell psychiatry they were wrong about me. For me, the Occupy Psychiatry protest in Philadelphia last May 5 was a great opportunity to do that. It's not possible for everyone in the world who is interested in psychiatric human rights to attend the May 19 protest and rally in San Francisco that is being held by Occupy Psychiatry, but there are millions of people who want (need) to see a change and activism can take any number of forms.

As family support people for those caught in the mental health system, our job is to mitigate as much of the trauma as we can.

With current self-publishing capabilities, there’s little that can stop anyone with the slightest messianic complex from actualizing their potential as a prophet—except perhaps the tactics psychiatry employs: forced drugging, locking people up and limiting their abilities to communicate with the rest of the world.

Based on any data from any country it is clear that we have a problem. Mental illness is on the rise. Researchers in the emerging field of nutritional psychiatry have documented the benefits of micronutrients to treat mental illness, showing that micronutrients help treat depression, stress, anxiety and autism and ADHD. Not a single study shows that the Western diet is good for our mental health. Many questions remain to be answered, but we can make some recommendations.

After I left my research position on the acute inpatient psychiatric unit of a Boston hospital towards the end of 2006, my life started...

The decision by the Institute of Psychiatry, Britain's leading centre for psychiatric research, to invite disgraced Professor Charles Nemeroff to speak at the inaugural lecture of the Institute's new Centre for Affective Disorders has caused a great deal of controversy, news that was recently featured on Mad in America. In the latest development members of the Critical Psychiatry Network in UK have written an open letter to Professor Pariantes, the Director of the new Centre for Affective Disorders, requesting that he cancel Nemeroff's invitation.

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

The German museum of the Prinzhorn Collection, which opened in 2001, exhibits the stolen art of those considered by the Nazis to be "degenerates."

What makes the DSM so pernicious is that it is a cultural document whose influence transcends not only psychiatric practice but also the Western civilization from which it originates. Each revision of the DSM rescripts and reimagines how we make sense of our experiences, reinterprets what thoughts, feelings and behaviors are socially sanctioned, and ultimately what it means to be human.

When fault is not placed on the right people, innocent people are left vulnerable and alone. They may also begin to question their ability to trust their own feelings and perceptions. When you refuse to blame the people who are legitimately at fault, you gaslight the people their actions are injuring, piling on additional hurt and making it much harder for the wounded to heal.

Psychosis pills were hailed as a great advance, but this was because they kept the patients docile and quiet, which was very popular with the staff in psychiatric wards.

I worked for ten-and-a-half years as a psychotherapist, nine of them licensed and one-and-a-half as a social work intern. For the last four years I have worked as a filmmaker. I have considered of late turning in my therapy license (an LCSW), and, if I were to return to the psychological helping profession, to do so as a life coach—unlicensed and outside the system. But is this wise?

The fuzzy concept of neurodivergence has expanded to include almost every human experience, plus its opposite.

Why do stories matter? Why is it that what a psychiatrist says to a patient about their experiences can have such a powerful effect - for good or for ill? This is something that has puzzled me for many years. It still does.

In the Sunday New York Times Magazine, an article by Siddhartha Mukherjee entitled “Post-Prozac Nation” appeared. I eagerly read this article, wondering what position...

Those of us, the survivors, who speak from experience, with nothing to gain from sharing our stories and in fact a hell of a lot to lose, risk having them revised or repudiated at every turn by the very people who, and paradigm which, sickened us. I’m simply trying to tell my story as I lived it, because I know exactly what I went through and why, and I don’t think anyone else should have to suffer this way if they need not do so.

Our therapies need to treat the root causes of mental distress—especially trauma and environment—and not just numb the pain.

Psychiatrists believe people can have both bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder, referred to as “borderpolar,” although this is not an official DSM diagnosis.

In its obituary of Bonnie Burstow, the New York Times published a comment from historian Edward Shorter that was both vile and slanderous. Burstow, if she had been alive, could easily have set the record straight.

Reframing inertia as an adaptive, biologically based survival response offers a powerful alternative to traditional deficit-oriented models.

Bob-- A couple of weeks ago, I got a call from the mother of one of my teenage patients, a 14 year old Chinese-american boy...

Martin Harrow has just published his 20-year outcomes data for schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders. Those who took antipsychotics regularly experienced more psychosis, more anxiety, cognitive impairment, and markedly fewer periods of "sustained recovery." Harrow asks: "Is very long-term treatment with antipsychotic medications undesirable?"