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).

Yesterday I Looked Forward to Taking Psych Drugs

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People hassle me for being anti-medication, and I always tell them I am NOT anti-medication; I am pro-fully-informed choice. But people like things black-and-white. They see me as being against medications, and so I'm telling you why medications may have saved my life yesterday, or at least saved me a whole bunch more trouble.

Redemption Songs: Music and Madness

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The road was dark and I only half knew where I was going. East. I couldn’t see through the rearview mirror, because the backseat was piled high with boxes. It didn't matter, there were no other cars on the highway. It was just me, in the middle of the night, driving and crying.

Psychiatry Is Not the Only Branch of Medicine to Lose Its Soul to Pharma

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In the present climate, the truth proves elusive. Almost all clinical studies of various drugs are designed and funded by the pharmaceutical companies. Only the studies which support efficacy of a drug are published while the more numerous negative studies are rarely acknowledged. While companies are supposed to register the studies they are conducting so that planned timing of study endpoints are public knowledge, these requirements are often ignored.

A Reflective Checklist to Reduce Psychotropic Drugs for Vulnerable Children

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This thought-provoking reflective checklist strategy is designed to challenge the increasing 'quick fix' mentality of many doctors who decide to move immediately from a possible diagnosis to medication. With school-aged children we need to promote their Safeguarding, and a Pause-Reflect-Review process that will, hopefully, reduce unnecessary prescribing.

Six First Steps for Building Communities of Emotional Wellness

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I am being asked by a number of grassroots communities to facilitate a dialogue about how they can better welcome and support individuals who experience emotional distress. This is a challenge for many aspiring peers and allies in a culture where responsibility for our individual well-being has been increasingly transferred to psychiatrists, doctors, and other health professionals.

DxSummit Officially Launches

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As co-chair of the Diagnostic Summit Committee of the Society for Humanistic Psychology, I am pleased to announce that today we officially launch the Global Summit on Diagnostic Alternatives (DxSummit.org), an online platform for rethinking mental health. Our goal is to provide a place for a collegial and rigorous discussion of alternative ways to conceptualize and practice diagnosis. Today's launch is marked by the appearance of our first eight posts. These posts come from a variety of prominent people in the field, each offering a unique perspective on the current state of diagnosis and where we might take things as we move forward.

Mad in Ireland

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Although Jennifer Hough’s older sister, Valerie, was diagnosed with bipolar disorder when she was fifteen, Hough never saw her sister as mentally ill. “To...

The Shame Game of “Patient Responsibility”

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On one hand the use of prescription drugs in mental health treatment has been compared to insulin for the diabetic. You never hear about...

Consciousness Revealed – Revolutionary Implications for Psychiatry

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The billions of dollars of research into fictitious brain diseases, which traces apparently faulty genes or neurotransmitters, is a fruitless enterprise looking in all the wrong places. A lot of brain research at best hits on a fad and metastasizes. At its worst it follows the big money from the pharmaceutical companies or tries to suit the self-serving political agenda of the APA in its current agenda: the search for biological markers.

How Coalition or Community Engagement Work Damages Advocates

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Have you ever tried to do community engagement or join a coalition of people working on mental health stuff? If you have been unhappy doing coalition work or community engagement, they may have said it was you. They may have complained that you were too demanding or too triggered by your trauma issues. But the problem is not on us as advocates. This is a structural problem. How do you keep the disease model people from dominating?

Publication Bias and Meta-Analyses: Tainting the Gold Standard with Lead

For decades the gold standard for medical evidence was the review article - an essay looking at most or (hopefully) all of the research on a particular question and trying to divine a general trend in the data toward some conclusion ("therapy X seems to be good for condition Y," for example). More recently, the format of review articles has shifted - at least where the questions addressed have leant themselves to the new style. The idea has been to look at the original data for all of the studies available, and in effect reanalyze them as though the research participants were all taking part in one gigantic study. By increasing the number of data points and averaging across the vagaries of different studies, a clearer finding might emerge. The meta-analysis has gone on to be revered as a strategy for advancing healthcare. It has vulnerabilities.

How You Have Changed Me

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It has been a year this since the Mad In America website launched and I posted my first blog. You have been a smart and well informed audience. I know that many of you are eager to change the mental health system; for what it is worth, you have changed one doctor.

Doctor Munchausen, I Presume!

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In 2000 when I gave a lecture on "Psychopharmacology and the Government of the Self" at the invitation of the University of Toronto, I ran into a problem.  In the public domain our shared difficulties were because of this lecture.  In fact, the difficulties stemmed from a member of the Establishment – Charlie Nemeroff – who put the frighteners on the U of T about hiring Healy. 'The psychopharmacology establishment in the face of adverse effects from drugs' is the same as 'the medical establishment in the face of treatment-related adverse effects' is the same as 'the British establishment in the face of allegations of paedophilia and child abuse' is the same as 'the Vatican in the face of allegations of abuse.' It’s about power.  We have it – you don’t.  Get lost.

Why I Prescribe

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This is about neuroleptics. It is about psychosis or madness or whatever term one prefers. It is about people 18 years and older. I take...

Critical Psychiatry Network Calls on Institute of Psychiatry to Cancel Charles Nemeroff

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The decision by the Institute of Psychiatry, Britain's leading centre for psychiatric research, to invite disgraced Professor Charles Nemeroff to speak at the inaugural lecture of the Institute's new Centre for Affective Disorders has caused a great deal of controversy, news that was recently featured on Mad in America. In the latest development members of the Critical Psychiatry Network in UK have written an open letter to Professor Pariantes, the Director of the new Centre for Affective Disorders, requesting that he cancel Nemeroff's invitation.

Publication Bias: Does Unpublished Data Make Science Pseudo?

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Recently the problem of publication bias has been shaking the foundations of much of psychology and medicine. In the field of pharmacology, the problem is worse, because the majority of outcome trials (on which medication approval and physician information is based) are conducted by pharmaceutical firms that stand to benefit enormously from positive results, and run the risk of enormous financial loss from negative ones. Numerous studies have found that positive results tend to be published, while negative ones are quietly tucked under the rug.

Why West Virginia Has the Second Highest Prescription Drug Overdoses in Nation

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Did you know that West Virginia has the second highest rate of deaths from prescription drug overdoses in the country? I didn't, until I...
turtle reason to live

Simple Things

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Sometimes it's the simple things that keep us going, especially when the complicated ones seem so overwhelming; when there's too much chaos, too many emotions, too many possibilities and impending disasters. No one can give you a reason to live. You have to find it for yourself. Until you do, try simple things. For me, it was a turtle.
Medical informed consent paper document with signature. Agreement with doctor and patient in clinic. Information and purposes of medical scientific research. Treatment in hospital vector illustration.

What Does Consent Mean in Practice? A Lived Experience Perspective

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Every time I agreed to 'treatment’, I was told that it was necessary to save my life. I was sold a bunch of lies.

Birthing Bliss, Birthing Trauma, and the Role of the Perinatal Patient

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I remember looking out of my living room window, drawing on my connection to all the women in the world who had felt this energy before, all that were in that moment, and all that would in time to come. This energy, this incredible power, was like a wave that I was riding for a brief window of my life, and sharing with my baby to move us through time into a new type of union. To me, this wasn’t anything to resist, to be afraid of, or to suppress. All I had to do was be there to witness, and keep my mind from getting in the way.
believe

Bloodtime

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Free flow had characterized my creative process — and now an art practice that had come naturally since my childhood was extinguished. Not only were my reproductive capabilities shut down on psychiatric drugs, my ability to create art had been effectively disabled.

I Love … Stigma? Reaching Out to College Students & Beyond

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Apparently, May is ‘Mental Health Awareness’ month. However, the National Alliance for Mental Illness (NAMI) counters that with ‘Mental ILLNESS Awareness’ week that reportedly falls in October. Meanwhile, ‘Mental Health Awareness ’ day lands on April 16 (from 10am to 4pm, to be exact). ‘National Brain Awareness’ week picks up the baton on March 10 (passing it along to ‘World Bipolar Day’ on March 30). Other dates of note? Apparently, ‘Self Injury Awareness,’ day is on March 1, and the Disability World site cites an absolutely staggering list of dates to remember, including National Sauce Month (!?). But I digress. Suffice to say, my head is spinning

On Relaxing Off-Label Meds: Do the Opposite. Especially for Children. Especially Antipsychotics

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The US Food and Drug Administration has announced that there will soon be a public meeting to explore providing drug companies with greater flexibility in promoting off-label indications to doctors. When it comes to prescribing medications to children, and particularly psychiatric medications, this is a bad idea. I write both as a former consultant to the pharmaceutical industry, and as a father who lost a son to the toxic effects of antipsychotics prescribed off-label.

Public Engagement Fail: Creating Community Solutions

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Creating Community Solutions, part of the national mental health dialogue project, was started over four years ago to engage the public around mental health. It was based on a concept called deliberative democracy, where people who disagree with each other engage in dialogue to come to different solutions for a problem. However, for many reasons, this particular project only engaged with one part of the community. The chance to hear from the public was completely missed. Here is how that happened.

Please Don’t Empower Me Anymore

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Do you know the locations of all the best bathrooms? Do you often take a seat near the exit, just in case? Do you excuse yourself often to use the bathroom? Do you ever skip meals, or avoid certain foods, to avoid multiple bathroom trips? Do you know the locations of all the best bathrooms? Do you often take a seat near the exit, just in case? Do you excuse yourself often to use the bathroom? Do you ever skip meals, or avoid certain foods, to avoid multiple bathroom trips? Those are questions from the Crohn’s Workaround Quiz, developed by AbbVie to promote its blockbuster biologic drug, Humira, for Crohn’s Disease.  I took the quiz online, and passed with flying colors.