Blogs

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).

On May 5, 2012,  MindFreedom International is holding its Occupy the American Psychiatric Association protest at the APA's annual convention in Philadelphia.  Momentum is building for the...

I was in psychiatric treatment for eighteen years. For eighteen years I didn’t get the help I needed. Why didn’t I leave psychiatry long before? What made me stay in something that couldn’t help me and on the contrary worsened my mental health? Why did it take so many years before I turned my back on psychiatry and looked after alternatives?

For the last six years we, a group of researchers, social work students, peer experts, and social professionals associated with the Amsterdam University for Applied Sciences, have been studying and facilitating the development of self-managed programs in homelessness and mental health care in the Netherlands. With our research we want to contribute to the development of new and existing programs through critical reflection. With this blog, I hope to share some of our findings, to give back to the respites from which we learned so much.

I attended Milt Greek’s educational opportunity at Cooper Riis’ The Farm last February 25, 2013 and it was especially fortuitous for me. What I was able to glean from the presentation, in short, was that it shook me up.

Rethinking Psychiatry is an independent, grassroots group in Portland, Oregon that advocates for a paradigm shift in mental health care. On January 20, we hosted a film and discussion by activist and artist Barbara Ford. The subject was “Despair and Resilience: How to Face this Mess We’re in Without Giving Up.” Ford also showed film called Joanna Macy and the Great Turning, featuring philosopher, writer, and activist Joanna Macy.

For each person not sent to a state or federal prison, about $30,000 a year is saved. By starting a War on Mental Illness just as the War on Drugs is wrapping up, some mental health advocates hope to cash in on prison reform. Of course, many Americans might prefer to cash in through lower taxes. So it is essential — if the War on Mental Illness is to succeed — that Rep Murphy create a link in the public imagination between senseless acts of violence and psychiatric diagnosis. Although Murphy acknowledges that there is no empirical data linking psychiatric diagnosis and violence, he hopes to find a link between “untreated serious mental illness” and violence.

1) We need to unite with other health care improvement advocates. 2) We can make money doing this. 3) Time to get more mental health folks on Twitter. 4)Have a good conference networking system. 5) Allow serendipity to happen.

The suicide of Dan Markingson at the University of Minnesota has brought notoriety to the CAFÉ study and its site investigators, Stephen Olson and Charles Schulz. But the “corrective action” recently issued by the Minnesota Board of Social Work against the CAFÉ study coordinator, Jean Kenney, has raised another disturbing question.

Psychiatry clings to the broken brain theory, because without it, there is no justification for the employment of medical techniques in this area. Without the broken brain theory, psychiatrists are unnecessary, and even counterproductive. In their hearts, all psychiatrists know this, which is why they never address the fundamental question: why should all significant problems of thinking, feeling, and/or behaving be considered illnesses?

Little more than a week ago, I participated in a panel discussion that focused on the implications of the DSM-5 for social work practice. It was part of a larger conference co-sponsored by the NYU School of Social Work and the New York City chapter of NASW. So far as I know, it was the first such social work conference that’s taken place in New York specifically assembled to review the new DSM.

UN Human Rights Committee member Ms. Zonke Majodina said on Friday during the Committee's review of the United States: "I’m wondering whether any states have considered the ban which has been recommended by the Special Rapporteur on Torture made February last year, available on the UN website of documents. So given that it is really at state level that there is no compliance with the requirement to prohibit coercive treatments especially in mental health settings, I think the matter cannot just be left, there should be some form of good faith undertakings by federal government that these recommendations by UN bodies is taken seriously also at state level."

While I found the recent study, "Weighing the Evidence for Harm from Long-Term Treatment with Antipsychotic Medications," to be a valuable contribution to our understand of the role of long-term use of neuroleptic drugs, I continue to struggle with some of the implications for clinical work.

Very few public opinion polls on mental health issues have been conducted, and those that do exist are "forced choice" and presuppose an illness model. We at the East Side Institute wanted people to get the opportunity to reflect on and socialize their thoughts about the medical-mental illness-diagnostic model and its impact on their lives. And that is what they did!

As I re-examine my creative journey it is impossible for me to distinguish the peculiarities of manic-depression from a more universal experience of the creative process. Not coincidentally the poets, and all the great artists, to whom I was most drawn were ones I later learned shared my "mind" (having depression or manic-depression)—and it was their truths that moved me and revealed most poignantly the secrets of life.

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 joint ISEPP/UCLA conference was held in Los Angeles on November 14-16, 2014. Today, ISEPP and the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs are delighted to bring you videos of 13 of the 15 invited plenary talks. Each video is accompanied by a crisply written interview with the speaker, focusing on the goals of their work, challenges facing their profession, and how they evaluate any salient changes in mental health practice and research. These smartly produced and edited videos range from 20 to 30 minutes in length and are freely available on www.TransformingMadScience.com

When Linda Sarage and Jake Powers first approached me about writing a section for the fantastic manual developed by the addictions community — From the Ground Up: How to Build Your own Peer-to-Peer Recovery Center — that would help connect this manual to the mental health community, I envisioned writing a section that would serve as some sort of translation tool that could connect two very different communities toward a common purpose.  After reading the manual, however, I quickly remembered how much the mental health community has in common with the substance abuse community and how little “translation” is actually needed.

Anoiksis (the Dutch association of and for people with a psychotic vulnerability) has introduced a new name for the disease schizophrenia: Psychosis Susceptibility Syndrome (PSS). Together with the old name, its attached prejudices, misleading significance and stigma can be thrown overboard.

One has to wonder. If the State legislature had been aware of the details of the investigation into Adam Lanza’s psychiatrist, Dr. Paul Fox, prior to passing sweeping, costly mental health legislation, PA 13-3, would the vote have gone the same direction?

I hope this will be of help to people who hear voices and their friends and supporters. I also hope it will be helpful to the voices which are parts of many people's lives. Many voices I have come across and the people that hear them are convinced that their voices are spiritual in nature. I take an agnostic position on this, and therefore endeavour to respect different spiritual understandings. My intention is not to explain all voices psychologically but to help people make peace with their voices so they can get on with their lives.

When constructing the ADHD diagnosis, progenitors essentially say, "Let's study a group of people who do particular hyperactive, impulsive, and distracted behaviors that are associated with chronic and pervasive problems in school, social life, and work. If the person is an adult, the problems must be present in childhood and show consistency throughout development. We will call this group "ADHD" and study correlated biological characteristics and other associated difficulties. We will continue to tweak the criteria so that the diagnostic net falls on the people with the correlated dysfunctions and patterns of biology that we find in our research.

Fear. Omnipresent. Difficult to ward off or ignore. Just to advise readers, this long, somewhat involved article has been written for purely didactic purposes. Frankly, I’d like more folks to learn how to challenge their fears, how to organize and do systems change work. I trust readers will find it useful and that I managed to at least approximate what I intended.

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.

There is a great deal of discussion about youth being diagnosed - by general internists as well as psychiatrists - with ADHD, bipolar disorder, autism, irritability and depression and then joining the ranks of the pathologized and overmedicated on a march towards long-term distress. Less attention has been paid to the 27 million children who, covered by federal and state Medicaid programs, are at high risk due to dangerous mismanagement of second-generation anti-psychotic drugs (SGAs). Recent reports have documented the brutal facts.