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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.

It is time for a new understanding of suicidal feelings and actions. Perhaps a more open dialogue, without fear of sirens and police and involuntary hospitalizations, would have made a difference for one young man here in Asheville last month. Perhaps more public local conversation would have saved some of the 45 lives we lost here in Buncombe County in 2010. Perhaps a more public and safe national conversation would have saved some of the 22 veterans who died from suicide every day in 2010.

As I write this, my daughter is 18 months old. She operates 24-hours-per-day, 7-days-a-week under a baby’s natural assumption that she is loved and accepted exactly for her. She throws her whole self at you with complete faith that you’ll not only want to catch her, but be delighted to do so. She flashes her round belly, expecting those around her will fight for the privilege to kiss or blow on or tickle it. Any sign that you are questioning her wants and needs leads to shock expressed with wild abandon and never self-recrimination.

Greetings! My name is Michael Rock.  Until now I have been participating on MadinAmerica.com as a commenter named “Marcellas”.  It is very nice to finally introduce myself to this community under my real name.  Although I only occasionally commented, I have been a regular visitor and reader of MadInAmerica. I feel like I need to apologize for hiding behind Marcellas. Anonymity is not something I am proud of, nor was it a trivial matter to me. I have been working with people in groups for twenty five years.  I love my job, and believe I am helpful. I felt that "Marcellas" allowed me to continue to work quietly for change within the system.

Lucy Johnstone from the British Psychological Society on the influential BBC radio news programme, Today (13th May 2013), a great room 101 on changing...

What makes the DSM so pernicious is that it is a cultural document whose influence transcends not only psychiatric practice but also the Western civilization from which it originates. Each revision of the DSM rescripts and reimagines how we make sense of our experiences, reinterprets what thoughts, feelings and behaviors are socially sanctioned, and ultimately what it means to be human.

As the medical director of a community mental health center, my colleagues look to me for guidance on how to approach the new edition of the DSM. How many should we buy? How much time should be devoted to staff training? This is my answer.

In a bold and unprecedented move for any professional body, the UK Division of Clinical Psychology, a sub-division of the British Psychological Society, issued a Position Statement today calling for the end of the unevidenced biomedical model implied by psychiatric diagnosis. In brief, the argument is that the so-called ‘functional’ diagnoses – schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, personality disorder, ADHD and so on - are not scientifically valid categories and are often damaging in practice.

When Thomas Szasz’s name comes up in debates over defining mental illness, it is fairly common to hear people say something along the lines of, “Well, he made some good points, but he was just too extreme.” Yet I am struck by how conversations about DSM-5, being released this month, make the crisp arguments Szasz consistently offered for 50 years just as timely as ever. I’d even go so far as to suggest that a large number of counselors, psychologists, social workers, and psychiatrists pretty much agree with the main tenets of Szasz’s argument, despite their ongoing disclaimers.

If, a little over three years ago, you asked me who I was, my one and only answer would have been, “Bipolar.”  It was the word that defined me, that explained my emotions and behaviors, that gave me answers to the questions, Why am I so unhappy?  Why do I want to die every day?  Why is it so hard to get out of bed in the morning, to shower and brush my teeth and leave the house and interact with the world?  Why do I find it impossible to keep a job, a relationship, a responsibility?  Why do I never feel OK?

Mad in America has been under a low-grade attack by hackers for several weeks. I first noticed an odd traffic pattern in our Google Analytics account, indicating that the front page was receiving more than ten views for each unique visitor. This means that some minority of accounts was reloading our front page over and over again. This is called a botnet attack, where a hacker uses a set of zombie computers, often compromised by malware, to perform repetitive tasks.

Psych meds can not only put weight on regardless of how you otherwise care for yourself, they also tend to make people feel gravely lethargic and vaguely sick all the time. I could not exercise as I had before. Could not. It doesn't matter how much mental health professionals try to tell us that if we just exercised we'd be okay in the face of neurotoxic drugs that cause weight gain, because the fact is the drugs impede that capacity. This is not widely appreciated or understood and people on psych meds are again traumatized and made to feel guilty for something that is truly outside of their control as long as they are taking these medications.

My goal now is to focus on solutions for emotional distress, not talking about medical harm. We all know about the problems with medical harm, but not all people are clear about solutions. I'm not that clear, either, but I'm working on it. I'm not talking about revolution any longer, just trying to make my piece of the pie work.

Suicidal torment is magnified by the loss of hope. People in life-or-death survival conditions, such as being lost in the wilderness or being held prisoner of war, will dream and plan for the future in order to make their present conditions tolerable. The critically ill heart patient expresses his faith in his upcoming surgery by making a date to play golf six weeks after the operation. But the depressed person sees no viable future. There is nothing to look forward to, no dreams to fulfill, only the never-ending hell of the eternal present.

May 8^th in the USA Today:   “WASHINGTON (AP) — Wrigley says it is taking a new caffeinated gum off the market temporarily as the Food and Drug Administration investigates the safety of added caffeine.”  Really?  Major Tranquilizers, Amphetamines, Benzodiazepines, and Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors have all been approved by the FDA for the treatment of “mental illness.” These drugs are being prescribed to youth, some as young as 3 and 4 years of age. My Big League Chew is more dangerous than Uncle Jim’s Seroquel or my big brother’s Adderall?

I believe the video ‘Voices Matter’ has, quite apart from capturing the spirit of the Hearing Voices movement, filmed the first signs, the first moments of professional interest, hinting at the dangers that inevitably are present when a movement threatens the established order of things.

The decision by the National Institute of Mental Health to part company with the APA’s forthcoming DSM-5 should not be taken as evidence that biological psychiatry is entering a terminal decline. Far from it, as the Director of NIMH Thomas Insel’s blog of 29th April 2013 makes clear, the reason NIMH has opted for its own Research Diagnostic Criteria (RDoC) is because they believe psychiatric patients deserve something better.

Between 1999-2010, the suicide rate among Americans aged 35-64 years increased 28.4 percent. Major U.S. mental health institutions emphasize mental health treatment as a solution. However, suicide, depression, and many other serious emotional difficulties can be most easily prevented by political courage and different public policies, not by medical treatments.

For everyone who goes on psychiatric drugs, the reason comes back to power imbalances in their personal life. Women who's husbands “make all of the money” and have an unequal share of the power, kids who's parents have power over them—frequently people who have less money and security, therefore less platform for authority than those around them. Mental illness is not in fact an illness but an unequal division of power and sense of security in a social group.

Faced with questions about the $3 Billion fine imposed on GSK – is it just the cost of doing business? - Andrew Witty snapped back: “Although corporate malfeasance cases end up looking very big, they often have their origin in just… one or two people who didn’t quite do the right thing. It’s not about the big piece. The 100,000 people who work for GSK are just like you, right? I’m sure everybody who reads the BMJ has friends who work for drug companies. They’re normal people… Many of them are doctors."

Those of you following our posts on Nutrition and Mental Health know that we ended the last one, on ‘history’, by saying that the two of us are essentially devoting our research lives to re-inventing the wheel. It is old knowledge that good nutrition is essential for mental health, and it is really old knowledge that improving nutrition can improve mental health. We are going to spend the next few blogs outlining the science and rationale that supports the role played by nutrition in wellness as well as the expression of mental illness. This information will provide modern scientific validation for the conclusions drawn by some of our ancestors, described in the previous blogs.

I have known altered states of consciousness since I was a child.  I clearly remember staring into the mirror in my mother’s bathroom and...

The Hearing Voices movement is a beautiful thing, and last year it was 25 years old. What has happened in 25 years? A confidence has grown in a different approach to hearing voices, listening and embracing rather than trying to control and silence voices. Key to this has been Hearing Voices groups and conferences, where people who hear voices are listened to with openness and curiosity. It’s not about telling people who hear voices to throw away their pills if they are taking them, its about creating spaces to listen deeply to what is happening.

Ever since I had realized how I had been so terribly wounded in my life, I had wanted to tell psychiatry they were wrong about me. For me, the Occupy Psychiatry protest in Philadelphia last May 5 was a great opportunity to do that. It's not possible for everyone in the world who is interested in psychiatric human rights to attend the May 19 protest and rally in San Francisco that is being held by Occupy Psychiatry, but there are millions of people who want (need) to see a change and activism can take any number of forms.

It was Sunday, December 4, 1960. I had been sad and depressed and taken a small overdose of Aspirin in an attention-getting gesture for help. My parents took me to where they thought was the best place at the time: Massachusetts General Hospital emergency room. From there, my three-year hellish odyssey began. In those days, it was easy to be locked up and committed against your will and nearly impossible to get out. Many people never did.