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Danish psychiatry has been besieged by scandals. Or perhaps it is better to say 'exposed', as many of the scandals - like massive overmedication, deaths etc. - have been an ongoing problem for years. 2014 has started off with a bang. Two deaths due to psychiatric drugs acknowledged as being the cause of death. This is the first time this has happened.

This email came to me from one of my advocacy friends. It seems to me like this would be a super good opportunity to point out that "quality care" includes doing more good than harm, using evidence-based treatments, which may or may not be medication, and various other approaches we are all working for.

Many families trying to support someone in psychosis fall into the same trap professionals find themselves caught in: power struggles: "How can I make my relative change? What should I do to get them to see they are sick?" While it's hard to argue with wanting someone to get better, control and conformity are at the heart of everything wrong with the standard psychiatric approach. The deeper families dig themselves into forcing change on their relative, the more they flounder.

On December 23, I wrote a post called DSM-5 - Dimensional Diagnoses - More Conflicts of Interest?  In the article I sketched out the role of David Kupfer, MD, in promoting the concept of dimensional assessment in DSM-5, and I speculated that at least part of his motivation in this regard might have stemmed from the fact that he is a major shareholder in a company that is developing a computerized assessment instrument. The article precipitated a fairly lengthy debate in the comments section. The discussion was wide ranging, and some of the issues addressed were fundamental to the entire psychiatric debate, in particular: whether or not psychiatry is based on valid science.

On January 6th, 2014, a teenager with a diagnosis of schizophrenia died in North Carolina. He was shot and killed by the police that his parents called for help after he wanted to fight his mother. It is said that he was "having an episode."

In an era of prescribing rights for psychologists will psychology become a more marketable, less tarnished version of psychiatry, a target for pharma marketing and a new distribution channel for psychotropic drugs?

I’m not sure how I feel about horseback riding. Well, actually, I know that the act of horseback riding itself terrifies me, but really what I mean is: I’m not sure how I feel about the process of ‘breaking’ a horse to make it rideable. However, when I conducted some (admittedly superficial) research on the topic, I came up with an abundance of information.

I woke up to the sound of steady rain. Outside, four inches of snow still lay on the ground from the previous weekend. The temperatures had remained just above freezing, and the rain that was scheduled to come would likely only be intensifying as the morning wore on. But I had committed to the long run, knowing that my training was as much about being prepared for anything as it was for preparing my body for the actual number of miles to come.

Today President Obama stripped everyone who is subjected to forced in-home treatment of their second amendment constitutional rights. The federal law prohibiting the purchasing or possession of a firearm had applied to people who had been involuntarily hospitalized. Not anymore. Now tens of thousands of people under community involuntary commitment in over 40 states, have suddenly lost one of their constitutional rights. Are we the new terrorists?

Legal capacity is not the be-all and end-all of existence. Even in severely restricted circumstances the human spirit suffers, makes choices, and can even triumph. But most of us are not saints and prefer a bit more comfort in our circumstances – economic, legal, political and social – with greater opportunity to act and interact freely, make our own mistakes and cultivate lives that we value.

Open Dialogue is an innovative, network-based approach to persons experiencing severe psychiatric crises and conditions. Developed at Keropudas Hospital in Tornio, Finland, this way of working has garnered international attention for its outcomes with first time psychosis. Noting the positive interest Open Dialogue has begun to attract in the U.S., publisher Marvin Ross, in a recent Huffington Post blog (11/11/13), argues that before making the global claim that Open Dialogue achieves better results than standard treatment, we need to do more research. I agree.

It's amazing how much life or death conversation and thinking psych drugs inspire. In a way this seems to miss the point since our lives are obviously about something far more profound than weird chemical combinations that we don't understand. Yet they are what our first-world society has in place to respond to the life or death existential (and holy) questions and crises people tackle.

Stephen Hawking believes there are an infinite number of universes and that alien life exists. Nobel Prize winning physicist Neils Bohr’s interpretation of quantum mechanics shows a cat can be alive and dead simultaneously until we fix it in one state through our observation of it. These are ideas that most people would struggle to see as credible science and yet recent literature reviews reveal that physicists are far more trusted than psychiatrists.

A fictitious, familiar, yet incomplete NIMH press release appears below. Choose one term from each parenthesis to fill in each blank. You may select answers that reflect positions of the NIMH and/or assumptions of the biomedical model (listed first in each parentheses), or alternative answers based on science and/or reality (listed second). It’s up to you!

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.

I was never told directly that I had 'schizophrenia', and I am very glad about this. I know I was feeling bad, very bad, and was unsure of what to do, but I don’t see how a diagnosis could have helped me at that time. What could I have done with it? To be marked with a label like that would likely have caused me to rebel even more.

Hey Mad in America Community! Happy New Year! I want to share an exciting project with you that's going on at The Icarus Project. Members of The Icarus project have been imagining maps and roads and labyrinths that would lead us in our journey and ground us in the moment. These have been called “wellness maps” or “mad maps” – reminder documents we create for ourselves and the people around us about our wellness goals, warning signs, strategies for health and who we trust to look out for our best interests when we’re not at our best. As I've been saying for years, “The act of figuring out what it means personally to be healthy is about learning to leave a trail back to how we want to be. The clearer we articulate it, the easier it is to get back there.”

The case of this young girl, virtually kidnapped by Harvard psychiatrists who had her parents' custody rights taken away, has become a well-reported scandal. Ordinary people are seeing that the power of psychiatry, which has no place in a democratic society, can be used against regular folks. It isn't just a danger to the crazed psychotic killers that people with psychiatric labels are portrayed to be. This is a critical moment for our movement, and we should not ignore it.

Every year around this time, millions of people make their New Year’s resolutions. In many ways, our resolutions mirror the willful approach that is needed to overcome psychological conditions, even those of a severe nature. We must be cautious about agents which serve to dull us to our particular circumstances and state of mind, whether it be medications or otherwise.

I imagine if I were to get a lot of presents, I might want to return some of the stuff I'd received. Similarly, I like to return stuff of any kind that feels excessive or like it isn't useful to me, or isn't mine to have. I once had a unique experience with a young acupuncturist/Chinese medicine doctor in training. He asked me a question that in my 31 years no doctor had ever asked me before. Yet it was a simple question. “What do you think your health issues are about?” It instantly shook me out of my habitual thinking and “role” as a patient. In a sense he was “returning me my stuff.”

In this article I explore legal capacity as it has impacted my life, through the lens of a negative experience and a positive one. My aim is to encourage people to be aware that legal capacity is a social construct, it is not an inevitable fact of life and can be changed - indeed we are seeing it change before our eyes with respect to the particular act of marriage. Legal capacity is being similarly reshaped from a disability standpoint, in a much more comprehensive way. The story of legal capacity is the story of law in people’s lives.

Drug profitability requires three parties to work together – drug companies to make the drugs, psychiatrists to prescribe them and consumers to take them. Too often, though, patients have failed to play nicely and do their bit. They have banged on about tiresome things like adverse reactions and alternative treatments, they have expressed foolish opposition to the very concept of pharmacotherapy and questioned its efficacy. They have become medication non-compliant and undermined the profits of the pharmaceutical industry and the authority of psychiatry. They have been bad and landed themselves on a lot of people’s naughty lists and made the World Health Organization very sad and worried.

Here is a short review of the Tim Murphy mental health bill. I show the research that was left out when the bill was written, how advocates can approach the issue, and what the main problem with ignoring the research will be.

In our last blog, we focused on the fact that nutrient supplementation has not only been accepted in the realm of physical health in the past, but it has actually been endorsed by reputable sources such as the Journal of the American Medical Association editors who published the Fairfield and Fletcher articles 11 years ago recommending that all adults take a multivitamin to reduce their risk of cardiovascular disease, cancer, and osteoporosis (note that this is completely inconsistent with very recent studies reported in the Annals of Internal Medicine --- but that’s just the way science works, using different nutrients and different methodologies, coming up with discrepant findings, until facts finally emerge).

Two pieces of research have been published over the last two years that should prompt a major reorientation of the treatment of schizophrenia and psychosis, and a fundamental reappraisal of the use of antipsychotic drugs in general. Put together, these studies suggest that the standard approach to treating serious mental health problems may cause more harm than good. Long-term treatment with antipsychotic drugs has adverse effects on the brain, and may impair rather than improve chances of recovery for some. Many people ask me how the psychiatric profession has responded to this data. Surely, they think, it must have stimulated a major debate within the profession, and some critical reflection about why it took so long to recognise these worrying effects? Sadly, this does not appear to be happening.