Blogs

Essays by a diverse group of writers, in the United States and abroad, engaged in rethinking psychiatry. (The directory of personal stories can be found here, and initiatives here).

Why Is the APA Proposing Sweeping Changes to Training Requirements?

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The American Psychological Association has proposed sweeping changes to training, focusing on the behavioral health model, which reduces the complexity of the human experience to observable behaviors.

Book Review: “Prescription for Sorrow” by Patrick D. Hahn

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There are quite a few books published about the lack of benefit and harm caused by so-called "antidepressants." Prescription for Sorrow, by Patrick Hahn, is simply the best one I have read.

Boycott The DSM-5: Anachronistic Before Its Time

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When plans for the DSM-5 were first announced about ten years ago, most folks’ reaction was “Why?”. Many of us asked that same question several times as the publication date for the new tome kept on getting pushed back. Finally, the curtain enshrouding the DSM-5 Task Force and its several committees began to part and proposed revisions/additions began to appear on its website. To our dismay, we found our question answered.

New NICE Guidelines for ECT Are Dangerously Inadequate, Say 50 Patients and Professionals

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An open letter from patients, psychiatrists, and professors calls on NICE to rewrite the new ECT guidelines to avoid putting patients’ safety at risk.

Psychology and Neuroscience Are a Misfit

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Believing that mental disorders are reactions to life situations, are how people are avoiding pain, protecting themselves, feeling more adequate, reconstituting themselves, having the illusion of control, is associated with good treatment. It gives people the message that their symptoms are understandable, meaningful and potentially useful, that they can use them to learn about themselves, develop some compassion for themselves and learn how to manage their thoughts, emotions, intentions, perceptions and behavior in a way that will enable them to live more the way they want to live.

The Shoes Keep on Dropping… What Next?

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If your government espouses freedom for all but abuses citizens of its own as well other countries, its pronouncements are pure propaganda. This article seeks to help readers make the connection between the public and secret behaviors of the U.S. government as it continues to oppress those individuals within its reach that occupy a politically marginalized status; including, of course, persons who are survivors and/or users of psychiatric services.

What’s Really Behind GSK’s New Business Model?

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GSK has recently announced that it will cease paying doctors for promoting its drugs and sponsoring them to attend conferences and sever the link between pay for its sales representatives and the numbers of prescriptions physicians write. My reading of GSK’s annual report leaves me in no doubt that they are changing their business model because it is likely to increase their profitability – not because they are being forced to. There is a niche in the market for a pharmaceutical company to become the leader in ethical practice. It is not necessary for GSK to be ethical in reality but to create the perception of being so.

Implications of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement on Equitable Access to Healthcare

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A new generation of multilateral and bilateral trade agreements is likely to significantly threaten access and cost of healthcare, and limit signatory Governments sovereignty to prioritise health care policy to protect and improve the health of citizens. The Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA), a Pacific Rim regional trade agreement involving 12 countries — including New Zealand, Australia and the US — is one such agreement, and it has the potential to significantly alter the domestic environment for health policy-making.

Creatively Managing Voice-Hearing Through Spiritual Writing

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I am a psychiatric survivor of over thirty-six years. Since my nervous breakdown in 1978, I have undergone multitudinous experiences ranging from the subtly humiliating to the horrifically debilitating at the hands of incompetent psychiatrists and psychopharmacologists who, in the name of medicine, did more harm than good.

Data Shows That Nutrients Reduce Aggression: Why is Policy Not Changing?

Despite study after study after study showing that there is a simple, cheap solution to reducing aggression in many people, the message hasn’t carried through to changing policies or treatment approaches. If a drug were shown to reduce aggression with no side effects, would it be ignored?
candle incident

Escaping from AOT: The Importance of the Incident with the Candle

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At my AOT hearing, in response to a question about whether I had had any problems with substance use, my counselor said that there had been “an incident with a candle.” There has never been an incident with a candle, but now it is enshrined in my permanent record, so vague and so general that it could mean anything.

January 17, 2011

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Bob-- About a month ago, I started caring for a fifty-five year old Filipino woman. She speaks English well, though with a heavy accent. She...

Peer Values Versus Violence: A View from Lived Experience

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Some of us have survived violent, coercive forms of socially condoned mental health treatments. But many of us grow past the pain, into healing and compassion.

Occupy APA in San Francisco: Joined in Spirit

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Tomorrow, May 18, the American Psychiatric Association kicks off its 166th annual conference. That same day, its new DSM-5 will be officially published. Given the occurrences of the past couple of weeks, which I’ll review briefly below, some members of the APA might wish tomorrow’s events would go unnoticed. But they won’t.

Pierce v. Pemiscot Hospital: Federal Judge Takes a Psychiatric Inmate’s Rights Seriously

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On June 13, 2014, United States District Court Judge Carol E. Jackson issued a Memorandum and Order decision holding that a former psychiatric inmate was allowed to bring federal civil rights claims under 42 U.S.C. §1983 against hospital personnel when the hospital continued to hold her against her will after authorization had expired. In her Memorandum and Order decision, Judge Jackson took Ms. Pierce's rights seriously and, reading through it, one gets a sense that the court was offended by the cavalier attitude of hospital personnel towards their patients' rights. It is clear that if the Court's ruling is upheld, it can result in dramatic improvement in the way people are treated in Missouri psychiatric hospitals.

How Should We Understand the Link Between ADHD and Early Death?

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Alarming headlines, based on a recent study, declare that diagnosis with ADHD doubles the risk of early death. Psychiatrist Stephen Faraone, commenting on the original study published in the Lancet, concludes that: “for clinicians early diagnosis and treatment should become the rule rather than the exception.” This conclusion represents a false assumption that the deaths occurred in cases that were not treated.

For a Well Mind, Try Revolution? Creative Maladjustment Week 2015

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Your mental wellness requires a global revolution. In fact, your physical wellness requires one, too. For many years, I have noticed that there are people doing good social change work for mild reform. That is nice, but during my work in what we affectionately call the “mad movement,” I have often called for revolution, because the change we need is so big! We have the technology, a solution is affordable, but we need to act urgently and the main question is, “Do we have the collective will?”
skeleton

Beneath the Fog

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The medication left me emotionally numb, making it impossible to connect with people or sense the aliveness of the world around me. But after two years on antidepressants, I found something that gave me jolt of feeling strong enough to wake me up for a moment. I then spent the next seven years giving myself daily doses of horror to induce an emotional reaction.

Post-Election Considerations for Users and Survivors of Psychiatry

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A variety of scenarios of social and economic collapse have gone through many of our minds since Election Day. Insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies want to keep people on drugs, but what if there was no government subsidy for those who can’t pay?
fruit and vegetables nutrition

What National Health Surveys Tell Us About Nutrition and Mental Health

We have been interested in the broad public health implications of nutrition, such as the findings from national health population surveys. What conclusion can be drawn from these studies? Improving people’s diets may protect them from experiencing poor mental health. 

September 18, 2010

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Dear Robert, I just finished Anatomy of an Epidemic while on vacation. I am a family physician (and writer) practicing in Colorado.  For years, my practice...

National Peer Certification

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Health disparities between the seriously persistent mentally ill (SPMI) population and general population exist which are alarming (MHA, 2008).  A report issued by the...

How My Anger Led Me to Forgiveness

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It may sound a bit cliché, but one of the best definitions of forgiveness I’ve ever heard was actually stated by Oprah Winfrey. Oprah’s definition of forgiveness is, “to accept the fact that the past can’t change.”

Hearing Voices Research & Development Fund

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Even though more and more researchers have become interested in investigating the complexities of voice hearing in and of itself (as opposed to treating it simply as one of a number of so-called "positive symptoms" of schizophrenia), the lack of a clear identification of the defining characteristics and significance of the experience for voice hearers makes it difficult to compare results across different studies.

The Quantum Mechanics of Tessa’s Dance & Signal Peak

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Although psychiatric researchers have speculated that the rate of people within the (politically-derived, biologically-fictional) racial category of ‘American Indian’ who simultaneously fit into the DSM category of schizophrenia is no greater than the ‘general population,’ we should remember that there’s no word at all for being mentally ill or psychotic or schizophrenic in any traditional language among Native Americans. I feel confident in asserting that’s likely also true for traditional indigenous languages worldwide. This is likely so because visionary, dream-time experiences are not viewed as sickness.