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The FDA's black box warnings on antidepressants, which incidentally were long overdue, had a negative impact on pharma-psychiatry's image, and on their business, but had no negative impact on client welfare. Nevertheless, psychiatry continues to resist the reality that their sacred drugs do in fact cause harm, and that the FDA warnings were needed. For psychiatry, business and professional status routinely trump client welfare.

“Psychiatric Drugs are More Dangerous than You Ever Imagined” is the newest video in my series Simple Truths about Psychiatry.  It provides a simple, direct and inescapable warning about this epidemic of harm induced by psychiatric drugs. The video sounds a necessary alarm about this growing tragedy, involving millions of people and their families, who never foresaw the disabling results of taking psychiatric drugs and giving them to their children.

The psychiatric survivor movement (and our overall “movement,” some of whom don't identify as psych survivors) is about as diverse and varied as the world itself. We are becoming perhaps the largest social justice movement ever to exist. Almost all women and queer people have been categorized by DSM diagnoses for being women (PMS, postpartum depression) or queer (homosexual, gender identity disorder), not to mention all the other groups who have been affected. Everyone is a survivor of the effects of the psychopharmaceutical industry on our consciousness.

Last year I reported that CHOICES, Inc. had lost its way and was implementing an ACT team. There is no doubt in my mind that CHOICES was on the wrong path, but the new Executive Director is committed to getting CHOICES back to a peer-run program.

In July of 2014, I published an article explaining my concerns about the push to allow prescription privileges for psychologists across the country, after news of the recent legislation in Illinois sanctioning this practice.  I cited four main areas of concern, which I will revisit below.  More discussion is necessary regarding these issues if we as psychologists, and the general public, are going to be fully informed.

Parents encounter many obstacles when trying to secure adequate educational, medical, psychological, and social supports for their children. These “dense bureaucracies” hurt not just families, but everyone.

When you consult the Royal College of Psychiatrists' website it proclaims that one of its primary aims is to "improve the mental health of individuals, their families and communities" — thus, to act in the public interest. Recent events at the Royal College concerning its public position on the Cipriani et al. antidepressants study put that proclamation in serious doubt.

The distribution and demand for psychiatric drugs is at its highest level since their first introduction over 50 years ago. As part of our culture of addiction modern psychiatry, in collusion with the pharmaceutical industry, has greatly expanded and increased the demand for their own particular versions of legal and highly profitable mind altering substances. This demand has become so great that even if the current medical establishment wanted to reverse this trend (something that will never happen), they would now face tremendous outrage from a mass of desperate consumers.

Dear Bob-- A disturbing case from this week. I was working at an urgent care and saw a fifteen-year old boy for the complaint of severe...

In 2008, Philip Cowen published an essay in Trends in Pharmacological Sciences. His essay leads off with the provocative question, “Serotonin and Depression: Pathological...

Human behavioral genetics and its allied field of psychiatric genetics are in trouble, as unfulfilled gene discovery expectations during the “euphoria of the 1980s” have continued to the present day, leading to researchers’ “nonreplication curse” dysphoria of the 2010s. In my recent book The Trouble with Twin Studies: A Reassessment of Twin Research in the Social and Behavioral Sciences, I presented a detailed argument that genetic interpretations of the common “classical twin method” finding that reared-together MZ twin pairs resemble each other more (correlate higher) for behavioral characteristics than do reared-together same-sex DZ twin pairs are invalid because, among other reasons, the twin method’s crucial MZ-DZ “equal environment assumption” (EEA) is false.

Our children are not safe. Not because of terrorists, but because it is becoming dangerous to advocate for their medical care without fear of losing them. A new charge, "Medical Child Abuse,” is now used by hospitals to remove inconvenient parents from the role of advocating for their children.

Coercion — the use of physical, legal, chemical, psychological, financial, and other forces to gain compliance — is intrinsic to our society’s employment, schooling, and parenting, but it isn’t to less “civilized” societies. Coercion fuels miserable marriages, unhappy families, and what we today call mental illness. Psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey, in Schizophrenia and Civilization, states “Schizophrenia appears to be a disease of civilization.” But Torrey is a strong advocate for coercive treatments, including forced medication — even though his own research shows a stronger relationship between severe mental illness and European-American civilization than with hypothesized biochemical agents that have never been found. Still, he has he not considered the toxic effects of coercion.

Many of us are taught to fear the expression of strong emotions, and to hide or suppress big feelings. We have also erroneously been taught that only specially trained people or “professionals” are equipped to handle these experiences. But people knowledgeable in conventional treatment often aren’t exposed to community-based, holistic, common sense, person-to-person approaches. Many people have gained wisdom and resiliency by working through emotional distress, and it is helpful to do this with someone who understands the growth potential in these experiences.

A landmark report has been released exploring possibilities for acknowledging the harms people experience in mental health systems.

Another scientific study that ostensibly identifies a biological cause of schizophrenia has appeared and is being widely reported. So, we finally have the elusive breakthrough to understanding the biological basis of schizophrenia. Or do we? A close look at the source of all this hyperbolic language raises serious questions about such enthusiasm.

In a bold and unprecedented move for any professional body, the UK Division of Clinical Psychology, a sub-division of the British Psychological Society, issued a Position Statement today calling for the end of the unevidenced biomedical model implied by psychiatric diagnosis. In brief, the argument is that the so-called ‘functional’ diagnoses – schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, personality disorder, ADHD and so on - are not scientifically valid categories and are often damaging in practice.

This month, the seventh study and eighth study came out on the topic of antidepressant exposure during pregnancy and autism.  And these studies showed, as essentially all of the others have, that antidepressant use during pregnancy (principally with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors or SSRIs) is associated with autism in the exposed children. With so many children being diagnosed with autism and so many women taking antidepressants during pregnancy, everyone wants to know: are these things (the antidepressants) associated with autism or not?  Quite frankly no one has the time to read through all eight scientific papers (and dozens more animal and basic science studies) to understand this important area, so I will do my best to briefly summarize it here.

There are very few things considered more taboo in the world of mental health than the suggestion that problematic family dynamics can lead to a child developing a psychotic disorder. And yet, when we look honestly at the history and research of psychosis and the broader concept of “mental illness,” it becomes apparent that there are few subjects in the mental health field that are more important. I’d like to invite you, then, to join me on a journey into this taboo territory, dividing our trip into three legs. In the first leg (Part One), we’ll go back in time to explore how such a crucial topic has become so vilified, and then embark upon a flight for an aerial view of some of the most essential findings of the last 60 plus years of research that look at the links between problematic family dynamics and psychosis.

We suspect that many people would benefit from an alteration in diet and there is certainly growing evidence that improving diet affects physical health. Whether that is true for mental health needs to be more rigorously tested, and we are encouraged that there are studies currently being conducted around the world attempting to manipulate diet to directly test this hypothesis.

A roundup of Mad in America's most read blogs and personal stories of 2024 as chosen by our readers.

By 2002 GlaxoSmithKline had done 3 studies in children who were depressed and described all three to FDA as negative.  As an old post on Bob Fiddaman’s blog reproduced here outlines, several years later they undertook another study in children in Japan. (Editor's note: This is a re-print, by David Healy, of a post by Bob Fiddaman)

The idea of schizophrenogenic or refrigerators mothers was an embarrassing era for psychiatry, and so psychiatrists were only too happy to explore the brain and the genome to unlock the secrets of mental illness. Today, the rhetoric has shifted away from intrapsychical conflicts and traumatic ruptures, and instead aberrant neurochemistry or delinquent genes are held as the source of mental illness. Regardless, the message is clear: mental illness is beyond our control and requires psychiatric intervention. The moral authority the mental health industry claims over our mental life rests on this claim.

One cause of fragility? Pathologizing our children with psychiatric diagnoses and focusing on a medical solution to life's problems.

A memorial blog for Deron S. Drumm, Executive Director of Advocacy Unlimited and founder of the Toivo wellness center, who passed away on April 4, 2019 from a sudden illness. Readers who knew Deron and would like to honor his life and work are invited to share their remembrances here.