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Would you accept money "with no strings attached" from a robber who, in the act of stealing, happened to kill some of his victims? Would you accept money that has been stolen? Would you accept sponsorships from tobacco companies for a meeting about lung diseases? Few doctors would. Why is it then that most doctors willingly accept sponsorships from drug companies that have earned much of their money illegally while being fully aware that their criminal activities have killed thousands of patients, the very people whose interests doctors are supposed to take care of?

In his Mad in America blog post “The End of Rethinking Psychiatry?” Jonathan Keyes writes about the support group Rethinking Psychiatry and how Portland’s First Unitarian Church has withdrawn its assistance and asked the group to leave the church. Jon wasn’t told the full story by his colleagues at Rethinking Psychiatry, and he didn’t ask the church about it. Turns out First Unitarian wasn’t the first organization to cease support for Rethinking Psychiatry; my organization did as well - and here’s some background about our decision.

In his Daily Show, political satirist Jon Stewart spoke recently about various LGBT issues, including current efforts of Texas Republicans to endorse the practice of reparative therapy − or, as it's also sometimes called, "pray away the gay" therapy. In an effort to qualify some of the techniques used by reparative therapists, Stewart quoted an Op-Ed that I wrote in 2012 for the magazine The Advocate about my own experiences undergoing a form of reparative therapy with a psychiatrist in Canada.

Can you imagine a world in which there were no psychiatrists, no psychiatric hospitals, no DSM diagnoses, no psychologists, no psychotherapists, no psychiatric drugs, no psychiatric patients, no counselors, no self-help groups, no life coaches, spiritual advisors, school social workers, employee assistance counsellors, trauma experts, PTSD specialists, child guidance clinics, drug treatment centers, pastoral counselling, university mental health services, outplacement services for terminated employees, burn-out specialists etc., etc., etc.?

The talk explains my own evolution as a psychiatrist and addresses the development of the Critical Psychiatry Network.  I focus on three main areas: psychiatric diagnosis, the influence of the commercial forces of the pharmaceutical industry on medicine in general and psychiatry in particular, and the evolution of the use of neuroleptic drugs (in that order).

The Ct.Post.com website ran an article yesterday titled, Sandy Hook Study Dragging, which on its face is one of the most biased and misinformed articles of “news” this writer has seen in some time. As is so typical of the reporting in Connecticut, the Ct.Post.com uses the Sandy Hook shooting as an excuse to attack the gun lobby and cheerlead for increased mental health services in the state. The problem with this self-serving reporting is that there is absolutely no proof that Sandy Hook shooter, Adam Lanza, lacked good mental health services. In fact, according to the records that have been made available, Lanza received abundant mental health care throughout his life.

The evolution of psychiatry in the recent era has to be carefully examined in connection to its strong links to the U.S. economy, especially the meteoric rise in the pharmaceutical industry, as well as other geo-political developments in the world, including increased governmental control and forms of repression in post 9/11 America.

A little more than 10 years ago, when I was 29 and 2 weeks away from turning 30, I was a patient in the psychiatric system here in Copenhagen. I am a pharmacist and I specialized in neurochemistry and psychotropics throughout my studies. While I was working in the labs at The Royal Danish School of Pharmacy I was intent on getting a job as a medicinal chemist at Lundbeck – the Danish pharmaceutical company behind Celexa and Lexapro and in their own words the only company specializing solely in developing drugs for the treatment of neurological and psychiatric disorders. We were taught that psychiatric disorders were diseases just like diabetes and hypotension.

For years, MindFreedom has been working to create more choice for persons who want help with emotional distress, life crises, overwhelm, spiritual emergencies, extreme states and difficult dilemmas. When co-founder David Oaks was asked if MindFreedom approved of the use of psychotropic drugs, his stock answer was something like: “We are all about choice and information. If people have good information and choose to use drugs, we are supportive. But forced treatment of all kinds is a violation of human rights. And we are opposed to the hegemony and bullying of mainstream psychiatry and it’s drug-based approach which squeezes out more safe, humane and life-enhancing approaches.”

There’s a fierce debate brewing on Capitol Hill over two competing bills that seek to overhaul our nation’s mental health system. Rep. Ron Barber (D-AZ), a survivor of Jared Loughner’s 2011 mass shooting, has proposed the Strengthening Mental Health in Our Communities Act of 2014, a bill that would provide additional funding for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration (SAMHSA). Barber’s legislation specifically targets at-risk populations who may be underserved − young people, seniors, veterans, and Native American communities − and seeks to provide patient-driven treatment before the illness becomes unmanageable.

German psychiatrist Stefan Leucht and colleagues have produced another really important paper. The results indicate that the small differences usually found between antidepressants and placebo are far below the sort of differences that would be clinically detectable or meaningful. Leucht et al. have conducted the first thorough, systematic attempt to provide some empirical evidence about what constitutes a clinically meaningful difference in scores on depression rating scales, although the study did not set out to explore antidepressant effects.

I was taught in medical school and psychiatric residency not to talk to people about their voices and their delusions: “It will only feed into them and make them worse.” Nor was I supposed to argue with people with paranoia because they’ll just get agitated and won’t change their mind anyway. We were taught that the psychoanalysts had wasted a lot of time trying to connect people with psychosis by trying to find meaning in their psychosis. I was taught that there is no meaning. All we needed to know about their psychosis was enough to prescribe medications and assess if the meds worked.

In response to the widespread tragedy of pathologizing and psychiatrizing people dealing with emotional and mental distress, and in view of the chronic abuse of those in extreme states by our “mental health” system and their powerful allies, I delivered this sermon June 29, 2014 at the Unitarian Church of Vancouver (Canada).

In a recent Ted Talk, “Depression is a Disease of Civilization.” professor Stephen Ilardi advances the thesis that depression is a disease of our modern lifestyle. As an example, Ilardi compares our modern culture to the Kaluli people — an indigenous tribe that lives in the highlands of New Guinea. When an anthopologist interviewed over 2,000 Kaluli, he found that only one person exhibited the symptoms of clinical depression, despite the fact the Kaluli are plagued by high rates of infant mortality, parasitic infection, and violent death. Yet, despite their harsh lives, the Kaluli do not experience depression as we know it.

Professor Sir Simon Wessely is a British psychiatrist who works at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College, London.  He is also the new President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and in that capacity, he recently wrote his first blog, titled, appropriately enough, My First Blog (May 24, 2014).  The article is essentially a perusal of, and commentary on, the program for the RCP's Annual Congress, about which Sir Simon expresses considerable enthusiasm.  He also engages in a little cheerleading: " . . . We [the RCP] are the most democratic of colleges. We welcome the views of patients and carers . . . " This statement struck me as odd

Here in Portland I have been involved with a group called Rethinking Psychiatry, an organization that is working to critically examine the modern mental health system and to promote alternative options for helping people in emotional distress. This group works out of the Unitarian Church here, the largest one on the West Coast.  Sadly, I just heard news that the Unitarian Church no longer wants Rethinking Psychiatry to be affiliated with them and is effectively asking them to leave.

In February of 2014, in the Journal of Experimental Psychology (General), Eddie Brummelman and colleagues published an article that revisited the subject of praise for youth.  For decades, praise and positive reinforcement had been hailed by mental health professionals as the antidote to many of our youth’s problems.  Parents regularly heard the message that there was no such thing as “bad praise.”  But as the research began to evolve, some began to question this notion.

Mahatma Gandhi said "If I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it even if I may not have it at the beginning." That is certainly how recovering from the heinousness of the iatrogenic injury of psychiatric drug withdrawal syndrome has worked for me!! -- my unrelenting determination to find a way through the maze of autonomic nervous system chaos has, indeed, brought me many gifts and continued healing . . . and it's not done yet!

As MIA readers may have noted, we recently opened a store on this site. You’ll find videos for sale there, as well as MIA merchandise. In the near future, we intend to begin selling ebooks as well.

Last week the Sandy Hook Advisory Commission threw another crumb to the masses, letting them know that, well, even though they can’t get any of the records and documents they want, they’ll forge ahead and produce a report, making mental health recommendations, that has absolutely nothing to do with Adam Lanza’s mental health history.

This is a memorial to my friend Ken Braiterman who was a long time member of the mental health civil rights movement. He was a best friend/ally/coworker/enemy of David Hilton, who lost his life to mental health civil rights battles. Ken wrote a great series of posts about David's struggle with advocacy.

The simple act of defining doctors or patients concerned about adverse events as “critics” is a rhetorical stroke that marginalizes concerns – makes you a one-percenter rather than one of the ninety-nine percent. The pharmaceutical market is the least free market on earth.

As my readers know, I am a great fan of former APA President Jeffrey Lieberman, MD.  His regular articles on Psychiatric News were always helpful to the anti-psychiatry cause, and he will be greatly missed. But his successor, Paul Summergrad, MD, has recently posted his first presidential message, APA Poised to Take Advantage of Unique Time in History, and it is already clear that not much has changed.

A study that appeared online in the British Medical Journal suggests that the FDA’s warning in 2003 that antidepressants increase the risk of suicidal ideation in youth paradoxically  led to an increase in suicide attempts in this age group. Media reports on the study tell of how the black-box warning “backfired.” But is this conclusion warranted by the study? Or is the study flawed? And how did the media report on this story?

‘Psychiatric prejudice’ is a term being bandied about these days, mainly by aggrieved psychiatrists. Ordinary people, other doctors and medical students are all prejudiced, they say, because they do not appreciate that psychiatry is a proper medical activity, and critics of psychiatry are prejudiced because their analyses undermine this medical point of view. However, many people remain inclined to view the difficulties we label as mental disorders as understandable reactions to adverse life events or circumstances and, importantly, evidence suggests they are more, not less, tolerant of such situations. In my view, there is a role for medical expertise in helping people with mental health problems, but that does not mean we have to call those problems illnesses.