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For several decades, since the days when I was a patient, I have seen and heard how an obsession with questions damages psychiatry. Many of us have been asked the same questions day after day, year after year: ‘Do your thoughts seem faster than normal?’, ‘Do you ever have thoughts in your mind which are not your own?’, ‘Do you feel anxious?’, and so on. Hearing only what a patient says under questioning when frozen by paralysis, or subject to the hyper-arousal of anxiety, the professional misses the opportunity to hear the threads of something new, the possibility of weaving with the patient a narrative of hope and recovery.

We have long been told that “low levels” of serotonin in the brain equal bad and sad, and we have been educated by the Pharmaceutical industry about the opportunity we have, through the use of antidepressants, to retrain our wayward neurons: by making the proverbial holes in the strainer that much smaller. But even if you accept the conventional wisdom regarding the role of serotonin in the narrative of mind, merriness, and misery, from where do we think that this magical neurochemical arises?

For many years, I’ve been curious about the full extent of the Indian Health Service’s psychiatric drug habit. If I was sitting down with the agency and trying to help, I’d likely ask questions like “Well, how much money do you spend on your habit? How often are you using? What are your ‘drugs of choice’?” If I’m to try to assist, I usually try to discover the interdependencies and relationships that represent obstacles to reducing and eventually quitting one’s habit. In the case of the IHS, those interdependencies are extraordinarily complex.

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.

There are various ways to analyze an institution like psychiatry. One of the most common is by mining examples. You might, for example, talk to few survivors who seem to embody what befalls most folk subject to psychiatric rule. Or, you might pen a stirring phenomenological account based on your own experiences. Here, I will introduce you to the bare beginnings of an inquiry—one that I found myself falling into but a couple of weeks back. The entry point is the arrival of a letter.

Cultural psychiatry provides a robust critique of a biologically orientated psychiatry. All cultures divide the world up into normal and abnormal; all have some notion of madness, but the idioms used to describe these states and the causes behind them can only ever be understood in the full context of the culture where they take place. It suggests that the very categories which are assumed to be natural occurring forms, are in fact just social and cultural constructions.

In former times, children who were routinely inattentive and impulsive were considered to be in need of training and discipline. By and large, school teachers and parents provided this. In fact, the training was usually provided before the matter even became an issue. Today these children are spuriously and arbitrarily labeled as ill, and are given pills. At the present time the pharma-psychiatric system is being widely exposed as the spurious, destructive, disempowering fraud that it is. Organized psychiatry is responding to these criticisms not by cleaning up its act, but instead by increasing its lobbying activity in the political arena.

Whistle Blown. On October 5th, 2014, I began an indefinite duration Hunger Strike upon the State of Colorado. I'm doing this because I have hard evidence of a pattern of plea coercion and child abuse coverup at Boulder County Mental Health Center, Inc. in the form of a wire recording of one of their employees, Dan Shearer.

In the late 70’s, before the invention of CT scanners or MRI scanners, I practiced emergency medicine. Without these sophisticated tools, I had to look at a patient and make a decision about whether or not they appeared ill or in distress. A doctor had to examine the patient; smell the patient, touch the patient, talk to the patient; this was crucial to the decision making process of diagnosis and treatment. With that sort of background, why do my observations and opinions as a psychiatrist somehow no longer matter?

Greetings, MIA readers. Would you like to write your own review of the DSM-5 (even if you haven’t read it, never mind bought it.) I’ve done neither, but I’ve read, talked, written enough about it to have an opinion. Write your own review of the DSM-5 on Amazon …Here's the link

I believe that Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman, the past president of the American Psychiatric Association must judge some writers and commenters here on MIA as being “anti-science” and “anarchists.” He has now published at least two articles that, in essence, suggest that critics of the DSM-5 and psychiatry should be silenced.

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.

On October 1st the Connecticut State Legislature’s reactionary response to the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary school went into effect. Public Act No. 13-3 requires all people that voluntarily admit to a hospital for mental health reasons (not solely for drug or alcohol treatment) have their names placed in a database administered by the Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services - for the purpose of automatic suspension of Second Amendment rights.

Those with mental health difficulties continue to face systemic barriers to holistic, person-centred care.

I am honored to share the story of one family that has learned about the power of language, hope and letting go with love so that every family member can grab on to a life worth living.

My opposition to psychiatric drugs is not just that they are harmful, dangerous, and destructive. That would be plenty motivation enough. And it is. But in addition, my profession, which I love and value, has been hijacked by the APA and Big Pharma. It is my goal to return psychiatry to its proper place - where good psychotherapy is understood to be the treatment for human suffering.

In answer to the question posed in the title to this article, probably not for a long, long time. Or perhaps more accurately, when...

I want to keep urging people to move toward the entrepreneurial approaches, because I think they are very powerful and not well understood or trusted in our community. I have chosen to build a business because I think it's one of the best ways I can impact on our world. After looking at the results of different types of advocacy work, this is the pressure point I've found most likely to make a difference.

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…

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.

I want to tell you about a magical tool I use particularly for navigating challenging situations. It's called Non violent communication (NVC). It's a way of understanding and communicating that I've found particularly useful in situations of conflict. I've hyped it up in the first sentence as a magical tool but like all useful things, it's got its limitations too. I guess the key is how and when to use it. So what am I talking about?

I spent 15 years slowly preparing for a trip into the unfaceable, in large part by observing an American human rights advocate and coalition builder (who has German heritage) do gut-wrenching emotional healing work particularly related to her internalized anti-Semitism and her internalized white racism. She inspired me with her intelligence, tenacity and determination to be free from the damaging effects of these forms of oppressions. Many of her family members supported the Nazies.

As the 60 Minutes episode featuring E. Fuller Torrey comes to air, I feel moved to ask: when will the lies that robbed me of my late teenage years and young adulthood stop? When will the false notion that professionals can predict who - and who will not - be violent give way to the reality - proven over and again - that they are no better able than chance to make such predictions? When will we see the reality that forced treatment is actually, statistically, more harmful than helpful? It certainly was not helpful for me.

KMSP News has aired a report of yet another mentally ill man pressured to enroll in a study of an unapproved antipsychotic drug, with near-disastrous results. His story bears a striking resemblance to the case of Dan Markingson, who committed suicide in a University of Minnesota study in 2004.

Law and spirituality both deal with the issue of responsibility. The law sets out norms and standards promulgated by authorities in accordance with the procedures established by the state, typically set out in a constitution or governing statute, or according to custom. These norms and standards might or might not reflect accurately a consensus about values and principles that are shared by the people governed by them, and might or might not have been adopted in procedures that are satisfyingly participatory and democratic.