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The medications are there to disconnect us from our divine, creative Self, but the human being is remarkable and incredibly resilient.

Now, personality tests are being used to determine which side of the wealth gap people will fall on. Who you are is not neutral — the lens your personality-test results will be viewed through is: “are you a good worker?” Any definition of this will likely exclude psychiatric survivors, those labeled by the DSM and those who see, think, hear, speak and feel differently.

Lately, after a number of discussions, we have been changing our practices around the issue of labels. No longer do we give a diagnosis at presentations. We place the young person’s story, as told to us, front and center. People listening rarely ask, “What is their diagnosis?” now that lived experiences are central. We are providing a sense of their struggles. We are trying.

In September of 2017, DK Law Group, LLP filed a Class Action Complaint against the manufacturers of ECT shock devices, alleging that they caused injury to patients by withholding from the FDA data relating to serious iatrogenic brain injuries resulting from ECT. The following developments have taken place since then.

If I thought that it was possible, I would have opened a string of clinics all over the country to help get people off of antidepressants.  Unfortunately, the problems that sometimes occur when people try to stop an SSRI antidepressant are much more severe and long-lasting than the medical profession acknowledges, and there is no antidote to these problems. The truth is, giving people information about taking antidepressants is like giving information to people who are enroute to a casino; they go because they hear that some people win (at least for a time), but the losers are the ones who ultimately pay for it all — and the odds are not in their favor.

Dear Bob-- Since you posted about my termination last week, I've received a lot of words of support and encouragement, and I wanted to say...

In the autumn of 1996, my son was seventeen when he told me one day on the way home from school: “I don’t know what’s happening, I can’t find my old self again.” He’d had a seemingly marvelous summer staying with family in Mexico, fishing and learning to surf. He’d achieved nearly a full scholarship for his junior year at a Boston private school. However, one teacher had observed that, in class, he “sometimes seems to be out of touch and unable to focus his mind.”

Twin studies and heritability estimates are used in support of biological determinism and in defense of the global inequality status quo.

Last week was my anniversary off a huge psych drug cocktail I’d been on for 20 years. In this video I speak to the inner resources that kept me going. The fact is there is nothing in society to help those who love us to understand what we are going through.

It has long been my contention that psychiatric "diagnoses" have no explanatory value, and in fact constitute nothing more than vague, unreliable re-labeling of the presenting problems. The only evidence for the so-called illness is the very behavior that it purports to explain. There is nothing more to it than that. Psychiatry consistently fails to respond to this particular criticism, and with equal consistency presents these labels as if they did have explanatory value.

What are Extreme Experiences? Other terms for them are Spiritual Crisis or Spiritual Emergency. With the appropriate support many find the experiences profoundly transformative. However, observers or relatives may have different beliefs about extreme experiences: perhaps that a person is having a psychological breakdown or mental health problems, or is psychotic or experiencing schizophrenia.

In November of 2011 I spent two weeks in Lithuania -- a fascinating time. Some colleagues in Scandinavia connected me with a progressive psychiatrist...

As you may know, the annual Alternatives Conference is the largest peer-run conference in mental health in the country and will take place December 4-7 at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Austin, Texas. You may not know that this year Alternatives is truly a cannot-miss event, for several reasons, the top ten of which are outlined below. But first, perhaps a little background on the conference would be helpful.

Let’s start only accepting real relational offerings that do not make us contort, disavow comfort, strong-arm ourselves into appearing strong, or shoulder responsibility that is not ours.

This study reinforces a large body of evidence suggesting that an individual’s expectancies for improvement significantly contribute to their actual improvement. The importance of expectancies is worth paying attention to now as more clients, clinicians, and researchers are endorsing a reductionist view of psychological disorders -- i.e., that psychological disorders are fundamentally brain disorders.

Those of us who question psychiatry’s relationship with medication may be be dismissed as ‘Pill Shamers’ or branded as irresponsible and dangerous voices by those who are convinced medication is the only way of treating someone’s ‘illness’. The debate can feel like a fight between two intractably opposed sides, giving the impression that we must either be ‘for’ or ‘against’ medication. Unfortunately the information and space needed to explore our complex relationship with medication – as practitioners and people – is in short supply, making the concept of informed choice a bad joke. Over the next two years, we will bring together a book made of contributions from people who have successfully taken control of their use of medication.

By 2011, anyone who read the scientific literature would have known that children cannot tolerate SSRIs and should not be given them. Neither Conrad nor Michelle seemed to have been warned about the common adverse effects (such as nightmares and compulsive suicidality) of the SSRI antidepressants they were on.

The American public has come to view ADHD drug treatment as a rather benign option for common behavioral and academic issues. A recent report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicates that 14% of American children receive a diagnosis of ADHD before the end of childhood. Rates of diagnosis and treatment vary by geographic region. In some communities rates of treatment are much higher than the national average. By most any reasonable measure, the number of children who are medicated under the guise of ADHD is out of bounds. Current levels of ADHD drug treatment are unsafe for individuals and society.

Like most doctors, I feel like I prescribe medications ethically and effectively. The basic foundation for that confidence is three things: 1) Knowing that my primary motivation is almost always to help my patients. 2) I try to defend myself as best I can from being too influenced by the profit seeking motivations of the pharmaceutical industry. And 3) I try to resist responding to various self destructive motivations of my patients. Prodded by Robert Whitaker’s books, I feel the need to build a more comprehensive approach to ethical and effective prescribing than I was taught or modeled or even than is expected of me. Here are four more foundations I’m building: 1) Individualized prescribing, 2) Recovery-based prescribing, 3) Trauma-informed prescribing, and 4) Toxicity-informed prescribing.

I lost almost four years of my life, and I’ve not a doubt that it was due to those “life-saving” pills. To that end, they did work. At a time when I was doubled-over with depression, those four prescriptions kept me alive. But then they killed me slowly and brought me back as a stranger.

For several decades, since the days when I was a patient, I have seen and heard how an obsession with questions damages psychiatry. Many of us have been asked the same questions day after day, year after year: ‘Do your thoughts seem faster than normal?’, ‘Do you ever have thoughts in your mind which are not your own?’, ‘Do you feel anxious?’, and so on. Hearing only what a patient says under questioning when frozen by paralysis, or subject to the hyper-arousal of anxiety, the professional misses the opportunity to hear the threads of something new, the possibility of weaving with the patient a narrative of hope and recovery.

Although I have always been conservative in my use of these drugs, I now include in my discussion with patients my concerns about brain atrophy and long term outcome. This is added to an ongoing conversation I have had regarding the risks of tardive dyskinesia and metabolic effects of these medications. In my opinion, informed consent is a process, so these are conversations that I have been having repeatedly with my patients.

President Obama called for a national mental health discussion a while ago and here are the details. It has the chance to be a dog and pony show as our peers were excluded from part of the planning process (making the discussion guide). But the organization that is running this has now recognized that problem and is working to balance different viewpoints on mental health. If we jump on it now, we have a chance to really get heard.

The UK’s Medicines & Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency is refusing to respond to the concerns of psychiatrists, parliamentarians, patients and other experts about the impending licensing of the street drug ketamine as a treatment for depression.

Scapegoating is an ancient human practice that probably dates from the time the first human beings decided to circle their huts -- what we fondly term the dawn of civilization. When things got tense in the compound, penalties got handed out to one or more individuals or families, those usually at the low end of the pole, the politically powerless or vulnerable.