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When women receive less pay than men for the same work, they were about two and a half times more likely to "have major depressive disorder," and about four times more likely to "have generalized anxiety disorder" than their male counterparts.  But when women were earning more than men, the odds were 1.2 and 1.5 respectively. The use of psychiatric terminology ("major depressive disorder" and "generalized anxiety disorder") constitutes something of a barrier to communication here, but the general message is clear: people (in this case women) who are routinely treated unfairly and discriminately are more likely to be depressed and anxious, than those not so treated.

This week Live & Learn launched a research study on the experience of people labeled with mental disorders who have tried to stop taking psychiatric medications. This project -- the Psychiatric Medication Discontinuation/Reduction (PMDR) Study -- aims to understand the process of coming off psychiatric medications in order to better support those who choose to do so. The study seeks to answer the question: What helps people stop their psychiatric medications? What gets in the way of stopping?

Contrary to popular belief, science is not immune to the corrupting influences of the society it operates in. When false results produced by p-hacked research have social, scientific, and political importance, and affect or harm the lives of millions of people while entire fields look on, it constitutes a scientific scandal.

I am deeply concerned that so many people reach out for help with mental health challenges and end up getting harsh treatment that is less than helpful and often harmful. I wish more of them knew about WRAP. And I wish that WRAP was a starting place for people on the journey to wellness, something they would be introduced to when they first reach out for help, rather than something they discover after they have experienced a lot of hardship and pain. In this article I have described the development process that we used to develop the Wellness Recovery Action Plan. In Part 2 I will describe the Values and eThics that have evolved around WRAP.

The drumbeat for more "Risk Management" just gets louder. And nowhere is this so alarmingly evident as a new policy proposed by the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health (DMH) in November 2012.

No one is safe from psychiatry’s project of medicalizing every variation of human emotion and behaviour, especially people viewed with suspicion and contempt by the powerful.

For those of you who haven't read it, I published a blog post called, 'Too Much Pies,' on Mad in America on Wednesday, April 10th.  The post included an invitation to psychiatrist Ronald Pies (who caught the interest of many when he wrote a letter to the New York Times about psychiatric diagnosis) to a real dialogue, not limited by number of words, frequency of reply or professional licensure. I copied the letter directly to Mr. Pies, not knowing if he would reply.  On Thursday, April 11th I received a direct reply that Mr. Pies has authorized me to repost here.  I am also including my response to him.

As we approach world hearing voices day 2013 Karen and I are in Canada. We have just enjoyed running a preconference workshop for about 100 people in Winnipeg. I am sitting in my room before breakfast writing this piece and as I sit I am thinking back twenty-three years ago; I am in a psych unit in Manchester and I have a new support worker called Lindsay. By then I had been a psych patient for almost ten years and was fast approaching spending the rest of my life in the system. My support worker had convinced me to go to a new group that was starting in Manchester called a hearing voices group.

What distinguishes the pharmaceutical industry from the producers of other potentially harmful products, is the fact that, governments have passed legislation allowing detention of potential customers and forced administration of its product to consumers who do not wish to purchase it. Imagine if goverments passed laws allowing other industries to detain potential customers and force them to use their products.

The human condition is both incredibly unique and yet so much the same. Our experiences are as vast as the oceans and as similar as the atoms that comprise them. Our calls range from the most secluded of hermits to the most exposed of world leaders. But we are all faced with betrayal and disappointment. We are all faced with each other.

Tom Burns, M.D., Psychiatrist and Professor of Social Psychiatry at Oxford, recently said of Assisted Outpatient Treatment (AOT) that “compulsion added to otherwise decent care makes no difference.” This was no easy conclusion for Burns, who for twenty years “argued ardently” for Community Treatment Orders (CTO’s), which are described as the British version of California’s newly passed AOT laws. "I worked for more than 20 years to get the CTO law passed," he said. "I thought such laws were going to make a difference, but they don't."

In inpatient eating disorders care, we were required to step on the scale but were not allowed to know what we weighed. We were told it was “against recovery” to know our weight; that knowing it would surely cause a devastating relapse.

I realized something after a recent occurrence that made me aware of how close any of us are to psychiatric lockup. What I realized is that I can protect myself now; I have tools that I didn't have at age 18. And that protecting myself doesn't mean obeying the patriarchal prescriptions for how to behave.

Your child has a room or a shared room where he sleeps, reads, plays video games, and all the rest. But what about that other room where he really resides, the room that is his mind? He takes that room with him everywhere.

The most spectacular part of Rep. Murphy’s hypocrisy has nothing to do with abortion or reproductive rights. Allegations of his dangerous behavior and his lack of insight into his own actions would be enough to commit him, involuntarily, to psychiatric treatment under the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act that he championed.

Language, and how we use it, are important to counselling’s conversational work. As a counsellor, my language for understanding and addressing client concerns often fits poorly with the diagnostic and treatment language used to manage services within that system.

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.

America’s answer to questions, demonstrations, and other countries is - increasingly - to don riot gear and show up with big guns no matter the issue. Today, April 3, 2014 the Murphy Bill will be debated by a House subcommittee. It appears to ask for dollars to help those diagnosed with mental illness, but it is Orwellian doublespeak for taking rights away, forcing treatment, and placing blame on the people who are more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators. Why not address violence as the cause of violence?

I woke up at 3 am this morning. The spring is a time of big energy for me. Once upon a time in my life this energy was pathologized and called manic, bipolar. I was taught to fear it and drug it and by no means express it. I have been unlearning all that for some years now.

My very good friend Marcia Meyers of Portland, Oregon is one of the most powerful leaders I have seen in my nearly 40 years of activism in the little-known movement for deep change in the mental health industry. She joined my amazing wife Debra, some friends and me for a backyard party at our Eugene home this summer and brought to my attention an issue that deserves a larger audience. Marcia’s story riveted me because it involves activism, madness, psychiatric torture of her beloved daughter, Unitarianism, secret poisoned-pen letters, Scientology and global warming!

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 American Psychological Association (APA) recently released its annual 2015 Stress in America survey.  For the 9^th straight year (since the survey began), financial issues were reported as the number one stressor in America.  Even while many parts of the U.S. economy have shown a resurgence, many Americans are reporting that financial strain continues to take its toll, likely having significant effects on our health and well-being.

There is a hunger out there for a foundational critique of psychiatry—something that pulls no punches, minces no words. That is, there is a hunger for a reasoned antipsychiatry position. Something that explains how we ended up here, provides solid evidence that psychiatry should be abandoned, and begins theorizing what we might do instead.

Study 329 seems to fit the classic picture: It has Big Pharma ghostwriting articles, hiding data, corrupting the scientific process and leaving a trail of death, disability and grieving relatives in its wake. But is it at fault alone? Both Big Pharma and Big Risk (the insurance industry) were once our allies in keeping our hopes alive – in keeping our children alive and well. They are now a threat. And of the two – Big Risk is the bigger threat.

He could have asked me if there was a specific event that had precipitated my suicide attempt. He could have asked if I had a history of trauma. He could have simply asked, “What happened?” “What are you feeling?” or “So what’s going on?” Nope. He chose to open our meeting with an accusatory remark about a make-believe eating disorder.