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The Sandy Hook Advisory Commission (SHAC) and the State Child Advocate's office still have produced no reports, and the deadlines continually come and go, with virtually no interest on the part of Governor Malloy or Connecticut state lawmakers. What is of interest, though, is the complete run-around and disconnect by those involved in producing the reports.

As part of the Affordable Care Act, the federal government has made a commitment to integrate behavioral health with physical medicine. Physicians have saddled America with addiction to antidepressants, antipsychotics, and benzodiazpines. If the federal government decides that opiate addiction is ok, as they seem to have conceded, shouldn’t the question be “what is the cheapest and the safest opiate?” In Europe, heroin is an option right along with buprenorphine and methadone. It seems to me that the “back-door” legalization of opiates under the guise of “treatment” ought to at least be debated out in the open.

The year before I was born, E. Fuller Torrey published ‘The Death of Psychiatry.’ Therein, he repeatedly made statements that are disdainful of the psychiatric profession and its core concepts. He also asserted that known brain diseases were responsible for "no more than 5 percent of the people we refer to as mentally 'ill’.” As recently as 1991, he has been quoted as calling for the end of psychiatry. In October of that year he said, “Now, if you give the people with brain diseases to neurology and the rest to education, there's really no need for psychiatry." I want to ask: “Edwin Fuller Torrey, what happened to you?”

My heart envisions a future of grassroots community-based, free, accessible, welcoming, non-judgmental and safe spaces for young people in the middle of the hurricane of adolescence....They will be spaces facilitated by those of us who’ve reclaimed what it means to be human.

My mother was once a bright, creative, beautiful young woman, a promising artist and a poet, who was captivated by the hippie movement. She was a creative bohemian artist, defying the conventions of our middle-class Jewish Midwestern family, which had carried a tradition of holding emotions inside and acting stoic. One day, soon after my grandparents’ divorce, she left. She hitched a ride to California, and from that point on, was never the same. The police picked her up on a park bench in Arizona, and she was committed for the first time at age 18. She rotated in and out of mental hospitals, the streets, and jail until her death.

Before we get to the meat and potatoes documenting how this headline is not only shocking but also accurate, you must know that a secondary goal of this blog is to test a few theories. I have been pondering these theories because it seems to be a mystery as to why (after more than two decades of whistleblowers warning the public) so many adults have not heard or heeded the news that ADHD stimulant drugs, which are not that different from cocaine, are extremely dangerous for kids.

At the present time psychiatry, because of intense pressure from its critics, is retreating somewhat from the chemical imbalance theory. But instead of acknowledging that this notion was flawed, that they knew it was flawed, and that they promoted it for self-gain, they are claiming that they never really said it in the first place.

In mainstream society, when attempting to assess whether or not someone is “mad” or “mentally ill,” a lot of effort is put into trying to determine whether or not someone is “delusional” (i.e, is harboring beliefs that do not conform to those generally held within mainstream society), and if deemed so, trying to coerce that person to conform. I believe this approach, however, is not only seriously misguided but potentially extremely harmful—not just to the individual but also to our society, our species and our planet.

The alleged “Prom day” killer, Christopher Plaskon, is a snap shot of the future result of Connecticut’s increased mental health services. The 17 year-old's defense apparently will be that his “mental health” caused his murderous actions – not the dangerous psychiatric drugs he obviously has been taking for some time.

Our Film Festival’s mission is to foster the pursuit of social justice and human rights by bringing together an international collective of voices, perspectives, and artistic presentations that challenge the current mental health system and explore alternative understandings of "mental illness." We have confirmed speakers coming from across the United States, England, Iceland, Sweden, and Canada, all of whom share a commitment to rethinking psychiatry and the current mental health system, and to cultivating effective alternatives.

Some things are floating around in my mind to try and make sense of. A big part of it is the connection of coercive/biopsychiatry to both race and gender politics. This is connected in my mind to the politics of healing in a larger sense than the singular healing any person might seek through therapy or personal search for wellness. It is a healing that is throughout the individual and society.

Sometimes I get so sick of the lies of biological psychiatry that I must speak out. At these moments I find silence to be a kind of emotional death: a death of my spirit, a death of my critical faculties, a death of my courage. I speak out because I am alive and I wish to align with life.

Despite the hiring of peers, the mental health system still has not implemented the recovery and trauma-informed values advocated by both SAMHSA and by people with the lived experience of mental health recovery. Person-centered planning requires a system-wide shift in communication, as well as adaptation of recovery-oriented, trauma-informed values. Tomorrow, Dan Fisher, W. Reid Smithdeal and I are offering a webinar that will provide administrators, managers, providers of mental health services and others with some essential communication tools needed to transform their systems to being recovery-based, trauma-informed and empowerment focused.

On April 19, 2014, The Lancet published an article titled Do we underestimate the benefits of antiddepressants?, by German psychiatrists Mazda Adli and Ulrich Hegerl. The authors argue that randomized controlled trials (RCT's), as currently conducted, systematically underestimate the benefits of antidepressants and overestimate the benefits of psychotherapy. But what's interesting is that in all the years that pharma-psychiatry was churning out its fraudulent, spurious and self-serving "findings," I never heard of a single complaint from psychiatry about these kinds of methodological issues.

When Doug Turkington, a UK psychiatrist, first announced to his colleagues that he wanted to help people with psychotic experiences by talking to them, he was told by some that this would just make them worse, and by others that this would be a risk to his own mental health, and would probably cause him to become psychotic! Fortunately, he didn’t believe either group, and in the following decades he went on to be a leading researcher and educator about talking to people within the method called CBT for psychosis.

With the semester over and summer quickly approaching, I sit here reflecting on the past school year. Thankfully, there were some shining moments for my two kids, my hundreds of students and the many schools I work with nationwide. But as a parent, professor and psychologist, I still have one main educational concern that still rises above all the rest. Can you guess what it is?

On May 16, 2014, I retired from a 35-year career as a professor of clinical psychology at Miami University. As a part of my retirement celebration, I gave a Final Lecture to my Department. These Final Lectures give retiring faculty members the opportunity to talk about anything they think is important for their colleagues and the attending students to hear. I focused on the changes I have witnessed in the profession of clinical psychology over my career; changes that were not for the better.

Consider what would happen if people in the United States were able to bring about greater income equality, akin to Japan’s.  The rate of mental disorders would drop by half.  Life expectancy, even of the upper middle class, would increase.  There would be more trust, fewer homicides and fewer prisoners.  These are some of the well documented effects of increasing income equality, as the social scientists Roger Wilkinson and Kate Pickett explain in their book The Spirit Level, and on their website, equalitytrust.org.

A routine trip for lab work resulted in a this typical encounter, a lab technician who says "When I was hospitalized they told me I'd never amount to anything in life because I was bipolar and I'd need to stay on these drugs forever. When I wanted to come off, my doctor got angry at me and wouldn't support me, so I went off on my own . . . now I'm 37 and I'm the manager of this office, a medical technician and I'm getting a masters in psychology."

Sometimes regarded as “treatment,” psychiatric bullying and harassment can no longer be considered as such. During the past two decades, the often devastating effects of psychiatric bullying and harassment have evidenced themselves on the wellbeing of consumers, and the climate of mental health facilities.The advent of mandatory anti-bullying policies in schools and workplaces has shifted thinking towards an acceptance that bullying occurs, causes harm and should not be tolerated. Could the development of anti-psychiatric bullying policies in mental health institutions make psychiatric abuse visible and create a zero tolerance culture?

Based on my experience both as a therapist and client in the mental health field, I have learned that when therapists or psychiatrists give you the following diagnoses all too often here is what they really mean:

Sometimes I happen upon folks talking about the work on Beyond Meds when I’m out and about on the internets. The other day for example I found a google group full of people who were largely inspired by the work on this blog. It was a lovely and surreal moment as I accidentally eaves dropped on their comments of gratitude about having found Beyond Meds. Today instead I stumbled upon a comment in which the person mused the opposite. She was not at all comfortable with my message . . .

My name is Tristano Ajmone. I’m Italian and 42 years old. I consider myself a “psychiatric survivor” — a term by which I don’t merely mean that I’ve been through the psychiatric system and got out of it; I really mean that I’ve survived a psychiatric journey in which some of my comrades weren’t as fortunate as me, and they simply died along the way.

The problem with instituting sweeping, costly and invasive mental health legislation is that there always are unintended consequences. The State of Connecticut, when passing Public Act 13-3, apparently didn’t consider that there are two sides to every story. And when it comes to “mental health” there most definitely is another side beyond the mental health we-need-early-intervention-to-help-those-suffering mantra.

On May 16, the New York Times ran an article titled Thousands of Toddlers Are Medicated for A.D.H.D., Report Finds, Raising Worries, by Alan Schwarz.  Here is the opening sentence: "More than 10,000 American toddlers 2 or 3 years old are being medicated for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder outside established pediatric guidelines, according to data presented on Friday by an official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."