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).

Stranger

13
I am quarantined in Stabilization. In front of me an old woman with cherry lipstick and a clipboard asks questions about sexual abuse, but my mind is through the square window on the door behind her. In that room I see a steel bed surrounded by emptiness. On top of it lay leather straps that are uneven in width where they’re wearing thin. Each strap has a set of holes to fasten the buckles tight, and I can see quite clearly that the ones nearest the end are circles while the ones furthest away have stretched into ovals. Tonight will be a Haldol night.

Understanding Psychosis and Schizophrenia – A Valuable, and Free, Online Report

5
What would happen if a team of highly qualified psychologists joined up with a team of people who knew psychosis from the inside, from their own journey into madness and then recovery – and if they collaborated in writing a guide to understanding the difficult states that get names like “psychosis” and schizophrenia”?

Final Lecture

39
On May 16, 2014, I retired from a 35-year career as a professor of clinical psychology at Miami University. As a part of my retirement celebration, I gave a Final Lecture to my Department. These Final Lectures give retiring faculty members the opportunity to talk about anything they think is important for their colleagues and the attending students to hear. I focused on the changes I have witnessed in the profession of clinical psychology over my career; changes that were not for the better.

Persecution: Dangerous Liaisons

5
If you participate in a clinical trial, the new industry "consent" forms mean you put your children and your wider family and community in a state of legal jeopardy. Because they can hide the data of your experience in the trial, even if you have been significantly injured by the treatment, companies can declare there were no side effects and your invalidated experience can then be used to deny justice to someone who is injured in exactly the same way you have been.

Mourning: Death, Loss, Trauma, & Psychotherapy – The Universal Agent for Recovery and Change

7
There are no set rules for grief. It takes however long it takes, sometimes years, sometimes more. Grieving operates on its own time. The very idea that the DSM-5 gives a two-week grace period before diagnosing a ‘biological depression’ is obscene on the face of it, never mind the handing out of Prozac. Other psychiatrists would like to push the window all the way to three or even four weeks. How compassionate. There is no place for antidepressants, ever

Replacing Psychiatrists and Psychotherapists

41
During World War II 2.5% of the world’s population died. Imagine a German youth of 18, A Russian youth of 18, a British youth of 18, an American Jewish youth of 18, a French youth of 18, a Japanese youth of 18. Think of the parents of each of these young men. Think of their grandparents. Think of their sisters, their younger brothers — think about everyone affected by that calamity. To say that the “mental health” of all of these people was affected by the fact of a world conflagration is to make a bad joke.

Mad Economy: Let’s Change the World!

18
Everyone in the world is either touched by their own mental health issues or have had a family member affected. What if they directed their buying power to an organization that would use the profits to fund exciting mental health & recovery projects both in the developing world and in their own countries; projects that would be ethical, non-coercive, personal recovery-based, and were aimed at creating recovery communities? What if they could buy products, crafts, services, art, music, books from people who had experienced mental health issues, enabling them to set up their own businesses or buy from social co-operatives that enabled distressed people to work and earn a living wage?

Finding the Gifts Within Madness

7
When people are seeing the world really different than we do, it’s often reassuring to think that there must be something wrong with them – because if they are completely wrong, or ill, then we don’t have to rethink our own sense of reality, we can instead be confident about that own understandings encompass all that we need to know. But it can be disorienting and damaging to others to have their experiences defined as “completely wrong” or “ill.” And we ourselves become more ignorant when we are too sure that there is no value in other ways of looking or experiencing.

Avoid the Hexperts

17
My search for peace of mind has taken me from giving up much control of my well-being to bio-psychiatry, to exploring unhealthy behaviors, to ultimately finding peace amidst fellow seekers in the holistic healing world. I found peace on my yoga mat, by eating healthy food, by quieting my mind through meditation, and by surrounding myself with people that nourish my soul. My wife, Carrie, has been by my side as we’ve collaboratively explored ways to enrich our lives and optimize our human experience. Recently, our search has intensified. My beautiful wife was diagnosed with advanced breast cancer.

Suicide Prevention for All: Making the World a Safer Place to Be Human

30
Like millions, I am sitting with the fact that one of the funniest people to grace the planet has died by his own hand. Robin Williams’ death has hit people of my generation, Generation X, especially hard. After all, his face flashed often across our childhood screens. Mork and Mindy episodes were a source of solace for me as a little girl, as I bounced around between foster homes and family members' homes, while my single mother cycled in and out of the state mental hospital, fighting to survive. I could laugh and say “nanu, nanu - shazbot” and "KO" and do the silly hand sign and forget for just a little while about living a life I didn’t ask for.

Providing Sanctuary

3
In these days with limited access to mental health facilities, and when in-patient or out patient treatment might be focused on invasive treatments and not on recovery, you may be tempted to "provide sanctuary" for a friend or family member who is experiencing serious mental health challenges. Many of you have probably already done this.

Tardive Dyskinesia in the Atypicals Era: Is The Risk Any Less Today Than Before?

0
A few weeks ago, while I was at a birthday celebration, a friend who works in a mental health setting remarked that she was...

Why Did 158+ People Attend an Antipsychiatry Book Launch? (A Reflection)

15
There is a hunger out there for a foundational critique of psychiatry—something that pulls no punches, minces no words. That is, there is a hunger for a reasoned antipsychiatry position. Something that explains how we ended up here, provides solid evidence that psychiatry should be abandoned, and begins theorizing what we might do instead.

New Documentary, “Creatively Maladjusted”: Diagnosed-Psychotic Quad Activist Goes Global Revolutionary!

5
Today a 10½ minute long documentary airs on Oregon TV. You can see me tearing up my psychiatric label, “psychotic,” Martin Luther King calling for us all to be “creatively maladjusted,” a re-creation of my big fall that broke my neck, what screwing up your vocal chords can sound like, and us protesting for global revolution. Yes, making revolution visible now all over Earth is a great way to be creatively maladjusted to global warming, and this documentary shows that if I can do it, then so can you!

A History of Anglo-American Psychiatry

17
It comes as something of a shock to realize that I have been researching and writing about the history of Anglo-American psychiatry for more than forty years now. It scarcely seems possible that more than three decades have passed since I first begun burrowing around in the archives of those Victorian museums of madness that in the early 1970s were still the all-too-concrete legacy of the enthusiasms of an earlier generation - those warehouses of the unwanted whose distinctive buildings for so long haunted the countryside and provided mute testimony to the emergence of segregative responses to the management of the mad.

What Happened After a Nation Methodically Murdered Its Schizophrenics? Rethinking Mental Illness and Its...

22
When we begin to question, we discover that (1) scientifically flawed research has been used to promote ideas around mental illness and its heritability, and (2) instead of focusing on nature vs. nurture causes of mental illness, it’s time to consider whether certain phenomena are really symptoms of pathology or instead are inextricable aspects of our humanity.

Can a Profession Be any More Confused?

18
Yesterday I attended psychiatry grand rounds, where Andy Miller presented his latest research. Andy has been a pioneer in the field of psychoneuroimmunology and an exponent for the view that major depression reflects systemic inflammation. (I have published a review of this literature recently in Frontiers in Psychology which is available for download).

We Have a Dream: Getting Engaged to a Doctor

60
Patient engagement is one of the mantras of current healthcare improvement efforts. Medical students and junior doctors likely think they are doing it better than their elders ever did. They are after all taught communication skills, where an earlier generation wasn’t. In fact, they are taught that they are being taught communication skills. They are taught how to communicate bad news. They are not taught how to hear awkward or bad news. The younger generation are almost certainly worse than former generations of doctors at listening for or actually hearing “the treatment you put me on, doctor, has made me worse.”

I Am Also Mad

102
Today I read Psychiatric News, the newspaper of the American Psychiatric Association, and I was drawn to an article about the new APA President, Jeffrey Lieberman, because the front page teaser announced that "he is 'mad as hell'".

Belief Systems, Nuance, and Productive Advocacy Ideas

12
For those with lived experience, do people believe your recovery story? What restrictions do people put on you when you tell your story? What one-liners have you found to defuse people's concerns so that they can hear you? How do you stay in the advocacy game instead of getting frustrated at being the only one who knows the data? This is my story of disclaimers, advocacy friends, respect for religious beliefs, and sustainable advocacy efforts.

Conspiracy Theories Fill a Need

19
While some people find their lives ruined by belief in imagined conspiracies that affect them personally - they may isolate from, or even attack, friends and family, and get diagnosed with psychosis - many other people believe in conspiracies on the basis of little evidence, yet have prominent places in society or even bodies like the US Senate. Yet it seems clear to me that the same dynamics are often involved in both.

House of Cards: Bad Science Creates False and Dangerous Beliefs

9
What is used to justify psychiatry today, if it is science at all, is bad science. Both the pharmaceutical industry and many of today’s psychological theories including those that support CBT employ the hoax of evidence-based psychiatry. We need to blow their cover.

No New Prozacs: A Dry Pipeline for New Psychiatric Drugs

11
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".

Cured Meat: an Underground Art Take on Mental Healthcare

14
There was a time when I, as a young woman, had not yet been a prostitute, a heroin addict, a homeless bum, and all that. I was, at that time, a literature student, at a famous school, and things were going well. But an eerie stampede of social workers and mental hospital stays were overshadowing it all. The tentacular reach of psychiatric drugs into the deepest recess of my being was performing a nasty assault on me from within the bloodstream. In order for my life not to be wasted, it became imperative that I get away. So I said goodbye, America. Goodbye, everybody that I used to know.

Dare to Dream: Remembering Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

3
Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr said that “of all the forms of inequality, injustice in healthcare is the most shocking and inhumane.” For those of us diagnosed with mental illnesses and our families and loved ones, we know all to well the effects of these inequalities from personal and first hand experiences. For those of us like me, we also know of the extreme health and mental health disparities that exist within our communities of color.