Blogs

On 6 January 2014, I published the article “Psychiatry Gone Astray” in a major Danish newspaper (Politiken), which started an important debate about the use and abuse of psychiatric drugs. Numerous articles followed, some written by psychiatrists who agreed with my views. For more than a month, there wasn’t a single day without discussion of these issues on radio, TV or in newspapers, and there were also debates at departments of psychiatry. People in Norway and Sweden have thanked me for having started the discussion, saying that it’s impossible to have such public debates about psychiatry in their country, and I have received hundreds of emails from patients that have confirmed with their own stories that what I wrote in my article is true.

TMS is a psychiatric treatment that uses a rapidly alternating magnetic field to induce electric currents in the brain. These currents stimulate neurons, causing them to "fire." When used repetitively, TMS is said to alter the excitability of the brain area that has been stimulated. In the psychiatric field, TMS is being used increasingly as a treatment for depression, particularly with so-called treatment-resistant clients. I Googled the string "TMS + depression" and got 1.35 million hits. So the idea is attracting attention.

Outpatient commitment laws, passed by a number of states, permit forced commitment to ‎treatment of those whom a psychiatrist, psychologist, or mental ‎health official deems in need of treatment. The majority of this “treatment,” while not ‎specifically written in the law, results in coercive tactics to pressure agreement to take ‎pharmaceutical preparations of limited-to-no effectiveness but - as shown in early research - with ‎massive effects on cognitive functions and subsequent decision-making ability, not to ‎mention a long-term or lifelong diminished quality of life and ability to function as a productive ‎member of society.

Recently, I have been the target of much wooing by my local Sunovion rep. I think he leaves messages for me almost weekly and he sends me missives - glossy brochures and reprints from major psychiatric journal. What is the subject of this attention? The drug - lurasidone (Latuda).

I have been immersed in the field of psychiatric diagnosis – and resistance to it – for more than a quarter of a century. In the late 1980s, I was a consultant to two committees appointed by DSM-IV Task Force head Allen Frances to decide what DSM-IV should contain. I resigned from those committees after two years because I was appalled by the way I saw that good scientific research was often being ignored, distorted, or lied about and the way that junk science was being used as though it were of high quality . . . if that suited the aims of those in charge.

Amidst a reported leveling in medication usage among young children, a disturbing side trend has emerged. Antipsychotic medication use in preschoolers has soared over the past decade, to the upwards tale of a two- to five- fold increase despite lack of FDA approval in almost all of these medications for this age group and little to no information about long-term side effects. In addition, researchers have noted that most antipsychotic medications were being used off-label, and increasingly for the treatment of behavioral issues that many argue are both developmentally inherent and often a product of significant environmental dysfunction.

A week ago, on February 7th, the Alaska Supreme Court issued its decision in Daniel G., and I am writing to obtain views on whether PsychRights should ask the United States Supreme Court to take the case on appeal.  (See What is the Emergency? for earlier discussion of this case)   There are close to 9,000 such requests, called a petition for certiorari each year, with the Supreme Court taking around 80, so the odds are very bad to begin with. It is not quite that bad because around 7,000 are prisoner appeals and only a handful of those are taken.

I’ve just finished reading Michel Foucault’s book History of Madness.  It is a tour de force that is at times almost impossible to understand, but I find if I am patient the loose ends usually are brought back together.  It is also highly upsetting to read for me as someone who has been locked up as mad.  The layers of history that Foucault uncovers demonstrate conceptual as well as legal and social forms of exclusion that are with us to the present day, although some of them have become transformed over time.

A memorandum submitted on the Children And Families Bill by the UK ADHD Partnership (UKAP) recommended that regulations issued to accompany the Children and Families Bill should include a requirement that “all children who receive two fixed term exclusions from school are screened for ADHD and, if appropriate, an assessment process for ADHD initiated.” The UKAP certainly appears to be a group the UK parliament should trust and, on the face of it, there is no reason that parliament should not adopt their recommendation. Except that the UKAP appears to be a front group for pharmaceutical company Shire, who manufacture the ADHD drug marketed as Vyvanase in the US and Elvanse in the UK.

As noted in Anatomy of an Epidemic, the prognosis for someone experiencing psychosis is far better in developing countries than in industrialized countries. Robert Whitaker and others posit that this is due to the treatment models used in the developing world, as well as to debility and chronicity caused by psychiatric drugs themselves. I think it's also important to explore traditional tribal and village based models of helping people experiencing psychosis and examine why they may be effective. Do these traditional societies know something we don't?

On November 12, 2013, Molecular Psychiatry published online Evidence That Duplications of 22q11.2 Protect Against Schizophrenia, by Rees et al. The print version was published last month – January 2014. The idea of a genetic mutation that would protect one from schizophrenia aroused a good deal of interest and enthusiasm. The paper has added some impetus to psychiatry's claim that the condition known as schizophrenia is a genetic disease. For this reason, I thought it might be helpful to take a closer look at the study.

Delegates attending the International Congress of the Royal College of Psychiatrists at London’s Barbican Centre in June this year will almost certainly not hear about the results of the seven-year outcome of the Dutch First Episode (FE) study widely discussed on Mad in America in recent months.

In 2004, a patient was given an experimental antipsychotic called bifeprunox and died of hepatorenal failure nine days later. But the sponsor apparently did not investigate the death for three years. In late 2007 the sponsor issued a safety alert and suspended all bifeprunox studies. This is where things get interesting.

In a recent commentary, University of Toronto historian Edward Shorter laments the efforts of people like myself in states like Texas who have successfully put limits on shocking children in order to induce grand mal convulsions. His argument is that we who have fought against this are denying children a benevolent medical treatment. In order to understand why Shorter’s plea to use electroshock on children is so egregious, we need to know what it does to children’s brains, which means a look at the science.

Naturally we human beings want to move from not knowing to knowledge. We want to move from not knowing how to cure a disease to finding a cure for that disease. But this natural desire to know things ought not make us believe that we know something when we do not yet know it. This is the case for what, for a given individual, may be his most important personal problem: his emotional health. We do not know much about “what goes on” inside human beings. Nor may we ever. This is perhaps the largest “not knowing” that confronts our species and maybe also the hardest one to swallow.

I competed in the 1996 Olympics in Judo. I also achieved complete mental health recovery from 12 psychiatric diagnoses and 29 psychiatric medication. I've also now mostly recovered from a traumatic brain injury, which probably was exacerbated by a lifetime of contact sports, ten years of psych meds before I learned about mental health recovery, and seven shock treatments, that are totally ineffective at promoting mental health recovery.

If you're on psychiatric drugs or you're a psychiatric survivor, chances are others told your story for you in their words. Like it or not (I hope you like it), you're going to have to retell your story in your own words, in your own way. If you choose to do this through blogging, social media, video or any other digital approaches, having your story read, seen and/or viewed by many could be very satisfying. You may not be ready to share it so publicly yet, but once you are, there are some tools to get your story out there to the masses.

An important study was headlined on MIA this week. The study examined the effectiveness of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to treat the symptoms of people labeled with a diagnosis of schizophrenia and related conditions who had elected to not take neuroleptic drugs.

In 2006 I undertook a neuropsychology placement during my Clinical Psychology Doctoral training course. It was in a community brain injury service. I had the fortunate experience of undertaking not only neuropsychological assessments, but also therapeutic interventions and service projects. My eyes were opened in a very positive way. Things suddenly made sense; psychology, interactions, life, all became much clearer. I now understood that we are all unique, not only because of our experiences and views on life, but because of our neurocircuitry. I began to see how our unique cognitive profiles make us who we are.

For most parents, addressing the topic of death is an uncomfortable proposition. Yet, it may be one of the most important discussions we have with our children.  Our lifelong response to death often affects our mental and physical health.  We must teach our children practices from an early age that can buffer the unavoidable distress that would come if the worst occurs.

Since I am new on Mad in America, I will tell you; my mission is to debunk the ADHD diagnosis. My goal is to add common sense to a world where drugging kids for acting like kids is all the rage. When discussing ADHD with concerned adults I share how little is required to earn a diagnosis of ADHD. Learning just how non-scientific the diagnosis actually is, for many, is a shocking discovery.

Julia has received a lot of media attention in the last few days as a result of her blinded RCT published in a prominent journal, the British Journal of Psychiatry, showing that micronutrients were better than placebo at improving ADHD and mood symptoms in adults. But what interests us far more is the amount of public emails we get as a result of this work. And the theme running through almost every email is that the child/adult/husband/wife has tried all kinds of medications and the symptoms are still there and, often, getting worse. Could the micronutrients help?

The Movement for Global Mental Health's objective is to ensure that people living in low- and middle-income countries have access to the best and most effective modern psychiatric drugs and therapies. In pursuing these objectives it assumes that to do so is a neutral project beyond political concerns. China Mills’ book Decolonizing Global Mental Health challenges this view.

The mission of Mad in America’s International Film Festival is rooted in a commitment to human rights and social justice, and our intention is to tell the evolving story of psychiatry over the past century, and to present films that question our current mental health system and highlight past and present-day alternatives.

On January 27 I posted a blog, Maternal Attachment in Infancy and Adult Mental Health, on my website Behaviorism and Mental Health. In this article I reviewed a longitudinal study by Fan et al.  The main finding of the study was: “Infants who experience unsupportive maternal behavior at 8 months have an increased risk for developing psychological sequelae later in life.”