Blogs

It struck me that I ought to interview “experts in the critical psychology field.” I reached out and did just that. There was general agreement that most people held the following ten erroneous assumptions about “the state of mental health services.”

The person living on the streets with whom no one will make eye contact, or who the police hassle for requesting spare change from passersby. The individual who has learned to cut themselves to manage emotional pain, and so is punished by emergency room staff who sew them up without anesthetic (both physical and emotional pain disregarded), or confuse their efforts for suicide and contain them against their will. The person of color who some might cross the street to avoid, or who is arrested for lashing out when another is murdered at the hands of those employed to ‘serve and protect.’ Each is only looking for a way to survive, but instead finds themselves ignored or blamed.

The mission of Mad in America’s International Film Festival is rooted in a commitment to human rights and social justice, and our intention is to tell the evolving story of psychiatry over the past century, and to present films that question our current mental health system and highlight past and present-day alternatives.

Some of the most marginalized and stigmatized people in a community are those with psychiatric diagnoses and those who are HIV positive.

In 2009, my friend Leonie’s 22-year-old son Shane killed himself and another young man after taking Citalopram for 17 days. Eighteen days after Shane’s death, Psychiatrist Dr Michael Corry publicly stated his view that he could not have done what he did had he not been on Citalopram. Initially Leonie admits to thinking he was mad. How could medicine prescribed by a doctor have anything to do with what had happened to her son?

This past year has been a terrible year for mental health in the news and other media. The most prevalent and widely publicized messaging has been heartily encouraged by national lobbying groups that "advocate" for expanded treatment of what they have deemed "severe diseases of the brain." Psychiatrists and proponents of the medical model are calling for what is basically a soft re-institutionalization of people deemed mentally ill, particularly those with diagnoses erroneously assumed to be “treatable, but not curable.” This perspective is dangerous. It supports violence and abuse. It feeds fear and delusion. It is not helpful.

During a recent dialogue training, Dr. Peter Rober, from Belgium, said, "listening deeply, going beyond categories, creates dialogical space in which life can come......

Sometimes the best way to make real change is just to do the work. Sometimes the talk is the work and it can be hard to separate out the two. However, in a growing number of instances, it’s hard to miss the futility of the talking and how tied up we can get in our own virtual war of words. Stepping away can be liberating. Sometimes, while everyone else is wrapped up in the talking, you can get an awful lot done.

On July 28, I published a post called Simon Says: Happiness Won't Cure Mental Illness.  The article was essentially a critique of a post written by British psychiatrist Simon Wessely, that essentially said that all psychiatric treatment alleviates suffering and makes people happier.  The falsity and self-serving aspect of this contention is glaringly obvious, and I drew attention to this. My essential point is this:  psychiatric drugs; illegal street drugs; alcohol and nicotine, all have in common that they confer a temporary good feeling.  That's why people use them.  But they also have in common that they are toxic substances, and if taken in sufficient quantity over a long enough period, they will inevitably cause organic damage.

GSK's continued failure to provide true transparency flies in the face of what the overwhelming majority of people signing consent forms probably intend - which is to make their data available for scrutiny by independent experts. If those who participate in trials thought some remote risk of a breach of privacy were being used to prevent disclosure of details that would save someone else's life - but threaten GSK's profits - most of us would likely be horrified.

Dear Reader, I am reaching out to you in the hope that you will get this message in time to act! Even if you only have time to read the first two sentences of this blog, please click here for instructions on how you can win the hearts and minds of our federal legislators and help them understand why HR 2646 – proposed by Rep. Tim Murphy and called the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act – is a bad bill

Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut released a new ‘Murphy Bill’ this past week. It’s called the ‘Mental Health Reform Act of 2015,’ though it has yet to be assigned an official number. While many words appear in its more than 100 pages, it’s worth noting that the term ‘evidence’ (most often paired with ‘based’ to form the familiar and supposedly scientific phrase, ‘evidence-based’) appears 27 times. Never to be outdone, the almost 200-page House version (‘Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis,’ H.R. 2646) from Representative Tim Murphy uses the same word 38 times. This makes sense. Why wouldn’t anyone want anything to do with… well… just about anything…

We first came under pressure to give our developmentally disabled and autistic daughter a psychiatric drug when she was in her mid-teens. She was attending a local school for autistic children but was unable to adapt to their program, and we were urged to consult a psychiatrist. What enabled us to resist the pressure to put our daughter on drugs?

Creating Community Solutions, part of the national mental health dialogue project, was started over four years ago to engage the public around mental health. It was based on a concept called deliberative democracy, where people who disagree with each other engage in dialogue to come to different solutions for a problem. However, for many reasons, this particular project only engaged with one part of the community. The chance to hear from the public was completely missed. Here is how that happened.

This thought-provoking reflective checklist strategy is designed to challenge the increasing 'quick fix' mentality of many doctors who decide to move immediately from a possible diagnosis to medication. With school-aged children we need to promote their Safeguarding, and a Pause-Reflect-Review process that will, hopefully, reduce unnecessary prescribing.

If the US wishes to maintain its reputation as a leader in the field of disability rights, it is not enough to assist other countries in building ramps and developing accessible technology. Those are laudable aims but are at best half of what the CRPD requires. There is a new world in disability rights, and the US risks being left behind unless there is a reversal of course that commits to full domestic implementation in compliance with standards that have been set by the international community with US participation.

Less than six months ago I had the great fortune to start working with a small group of fellow producers who had spent a chunk of time traveling and shooting at various conferences. Interviews with notable figures in the movement. Survivor stories. A mixed bag of “Mad Media”. Immersing myself in the now 200+ hours of raw footage was like swimming in a sea of the subconscious. So I was swallowed whole by the white whale, consumed with the energy to put my still-developing abilities to the best use I could think of.

Open the Paradigm.

A recent paper argues that prescribing antidepressants shortly after the death of a loved one is problematic . . . and a few days later, a Harvard academic publicly suggests prescribing antidepressants FOR bereavement. Wait, what?

How did the APA talk go? Overall a success-- the audio went viral on the internet, and the talk itself was so crowded we had to move to a larger room -- more than 70 psychiatrists and behavioral healthcare professionals attended. Afterwards many stepped up to shake my hand and congratulate me: I was told by two people I was a gift to the conference, asked to present at a Grand Rounds, encouraged to do a TED talk, thanked for my compassionate response to a question about forced treatment, and invited to do more trainings in the future. I even met several psychiatrists who are Madness Radio listeners. Psychiatry is clearly not a monolithic profession and many in it are beginning to think differently.

Big Pharma has done their job so well that they no longer need to bribe doctors with cash to get them to tout the party line. Their neurobiological belief system — that complex mental states can be meaningfully reduced to neurological structures and biochemical processes — is now so well entrenched in our culture it is becoming more and more difficult to find folks who doubt it, especially in medical schools and in departments of psychiatry.

While the outcome is disappointing, the revised UN prison rules reflect the stage we are currently in with regard to the incorporation of the CRPD standards elsewhere in the UN system. Some premises derived from the CRPD are brought forward, but the bottom line remains the same, to the detriment of people labeled with psychiatric diagnoses.

Machiavelli had it right. “There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order to things.” Ever since we launched our DSM-5 Boycott three weeks ago, we’ve received support from organizations and individuals but have become entangled in more wrangling than I ever would have anticipated.

Have you ever tried to do community engagement or join a coalition of people working on mental health stuff? If you have been unhappy doing coalition work or community engagement, they may have said it was you. They may have complained that you were too demanding or too triggered by your trauma issues. But the problem is not on us as advocates. This is a structural problem. How do you keep the disease model people from dominating?

Psychiatry in Context follows on from Phil Thomas’s previous ground-breaking analysis Postpsychiatry (Bracken & Thomas, 2005), and is set to become just as influential and indispensable to anyone concerned with the politics, practice, and philosophy of mental health. In some respects this is almost ironic, because a book like Psychiatry in Context would ideally be unnecessary.

An important new research paper was published this week on the topic of antidepressant use during pregnancy and preterm birth.  The issue is a crucial one as preterm birth (i.e. birth at less than 37 weeks gestational age) is one of the most challenging problems facing the obstetrical community today.  Rates of preterm birth have been increasing over the past two decades.  Babies born early have increased risks of morbidity and mortality.  At the same time, rates of antidepressant use during pregnancy have increased dramatically.