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Access intimacy is the intimacy I feel with many other disabled and sick people who have an automatic understanding of access needs out of our shared similar lived experience of the many different ways ableism manifests in our lives. Together, we share a kind of access intimacy that is ground-level, with no need for explanations. Instantly, we can hold the weight, emotion, logistics, isolation, trauma, fear, anxiety and pain of access.

I am alive today in the most intense, sometimes painful, always beautiful of ways, and one of the many reasons I credit for my life is this: I am a failed product of ‘Suicide Prevention.’ For this, I am eternally grateful. While this statement may sound like a confusing paradox, I’d like to explain what I mean.

The Wunderink study has been discussed here in other blogs. In brief, using a randomized control design, Wunderink found that in adults diagnosed with a psychotic disorder continuous use of neuroleptics was associated with worse functional outcomes. Is this study relevant to those who do not experience psychosis?

In 2012, I found out that the ten biggest drug companies in the world commit repeated and serious crimes to such a degree that they fulfill the criteria for organised crime under US law. I also found out how huge the consequences of the crimes are. They involve colossal thefts of public monies and they contribute substantially to the fact that our drugs are the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer.

The idea of spending more time as a bureaucrat in the US Embassy in Iceland did not appeal to me. I longed for the freedom that academics have. While pursuing that dream I stumbled into the world of international media, “chemical imbalance”, book publishing and a greedy professor of psychiatry which was a prelude to my second annus horribilis.

What would happen if professionals opened their minds about the nature of madness?  What new possibilities might be created if they questioned labels such...

Large numbers of studies are being conducted with many claiming internet use causes structural changes in the brain similar to those found in the brains of drug addicts. No snorting, smoking or injecting required. You just have to look at this drug for long enough and your brain is damaged. Is it possible your laptop and mobile phone are the crack cocaine of gadgets?

For years, people in Germany who act like they are radical antipsychiatry activists have said that in this country psychiatric violent (forced) treatment has been forbidden. Unfortunately, this is not true.

Sociologist Harold Garfinkel, in his landmark article "Conditions For a Successful Degradation Ceremony" wrote that "Degradation ceremonies are those concerned with the alteration of total...

While increasing numbers of Americans are being prescribed antidepressants, the Centers for Disease Control reports that suicide rates increased 28% from 1999 to 2010. Trained professionals remain unable to predict who is at risk. Their guess is as good as chance.

In 1988, the introduction of Prozac was hailed as a breakthrough in the treatment of depression. A quarter of a century later, the prospect of a similar breakthrough in psychiatric medications seems remote. On August 19, 2013, the New York Times ran an article called, “A Dry Pipeline for Psychiatric Drugs".

This is a summary compiled by people in the mental health civil rights movement. Some of us call ourselves psychiatric survivors; those who have survived psychiatric treatment, not the “illness.” Many of us have found scientific evidence and our own personal experiences showing that emotional distress is not an illness. We have found recovery using a variety of approaches and methods, but here are several concepts of hope and empowerment repeated in many of our personal stories.

For years, drug companies have sought to boost sales by hyping the benefits of new drugs while downplaying their risks. A couple of years ago the European Medicines Agency (equivalent of the FDA) set up a program to grant public access to all clinical trial results used in the approval of new drugs. The program was hailed by activists and researchers around the world as a big step forward for patient safety. Now AbbVie, along with another U.S. drug firm called Intermune, has filed a lawsuit to stop the release of clinical trials on their drugs, effectively shutting the whole program down.

Norman Doidge is a curious psychiatrist. He wanted to know how neuroplasticity could serve his practice and he sets out in his book, The Brain That Changes Itself, to interview and understand the work of leading neuroscientists who are using the natural neuroplasticity of the brain to heal everything from long-time post-injury paralysis to successfully managing OCD and anxiety.

When I teach workshops or lead discussions on coming off psychiatric drugs and alternatives, there are invariably parents present who are at loose ends. They want to know what to do for their children, how to help them best, and how it can be possible for their child to live without medication given all they have been through.

We are constantly hearing that ‘how we eat’ affects our health. The vast majority of studies showing the associations between diet and mental health have emerged in only the last decade, at best. So any professional who graduated over 10 years ago could potentially be completely unfamiliar with this body of research. We are encouraged by the number of professionals starting to pay attention to diet, but we have a long way to go.

We’re in scary times. For so many reasons. Perhaps the industrialization of ‘peer work’ should rank fairly low on the scale of scary, but - at least for me - it’s up there.

Coercion — the use of physical, legal, chemical, psychological, financial, and other forces to gain compliance — is intrinsic to our society’s employment, schooling, and parenting, but it isn’t to less “civilized” societies. Coercion fuels miserable marriages, unhappy families, and what we today call mental illness. Psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey, in Schizophrenia and Civilization, states “Schizophrenia appears to be a disease of civilization.” But Torrey is a strong advocate for coercive treatments, including forced medication — even though his own research shows a stronger relationship between severe mental illness and European-American civilization than with hypothesized biochemical agents that have never been found. Still, he has he not considered the toxic effects of coercion.

I’ve given the “the speech” hundreds of times to skeptical young people, to frightened families and to many homeless men and women. I’ve assured them all that “mental illness is like diabetes and your medications are like insulin.” I delivered this speech with all good intentions and unquestioned certainty of its veracity and helpfulness. I really bought the whole chemical imbalance narrative — hook, line and Seroquel.

President Obama called for a national mental health discussion a while ago and here are the details. It has the chance to be a dog and pony show as our peers were excluded from part of the planning process (making the discussion guide). But the organization that is running this has now recognized that problem and is working to balance different viewpoints on mental health. If we jump on it now, we have a chance to really get heard.

Dan Markingson was floridly psychotic and unable to give informed consent when University of Minnesota researchers coerced him into an industry-funded drug study. His mother, Mary Weiss, warned the researchers that Dan was in danger of killing himself, but she was ignored. Dan committed a violent suicide in 2004. Last week, after fighting the university and research regulators for nine years, Mary suffered a severe stroke. Her struggle for justice is in serious danger.

During the past 29 years I have been diagnosed with anxiety, depression, PTSD, Biploar II and complex PTSD. I have tried numerous drug combinations and have been through ECT several times. None of this helped me. My road to recovery started when I decided to rebel against conventional psychiatry.

Of all the beliefs that I have had about my experiences, the belief that I was ‘schizophrenic’ was the most damaging. In adopting the story that others told about me, and abandoning my own sense-making process, I held on to a belief that both hid my traumatic life experiences and rendered them irrelevant. Does it matter if we sometimes slip into the language of illness when we all agree that these experiences are meaningful, personal and have value? Yes. It does.

The Lived Experience Research Network Issue Briefs series promotes change through multiple perspectives. We recently launched our inaugural Fall 2013 edition of the LERN Issue Briefs series. These two-page briefs highlight issues of importance in the behavioral health and disabilities fields.

With nothing left to lose, I’d reached the point at which I had to make a choice: to fight, or to give up. Though things seemed to not be going my way, I decided to take back control and make drastic changes in hopes to survive. That’s when yoga, meditation and nutrition came into my life, but first, I had to find a doctor to help me get off the medication I was currently on.