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).

We are for truly informed choice; not anti-medications

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I have had quite a few discussions with people who have not heard of the research on this site. Very often as soon as...

You Are What You Eat

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Food is the most important thing any of us ingests and it seems foolish to not pay careful attention to the foods we choose to eat.

The Double Standard at the Heart of Peer Services

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There is clear evidence of a double standard and attitude that favors and privileges one side of the binary—the clinicians—over peers. This discrimination must be made visible and revealed to mental health advocates and changemakers.

The United Met States of Psychiatry

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Psychiatry’s desperate drive to legitimize itself as a profitable medical authority has resulted in a mass delusion so pervasive and destructive that it's put us on a path towards societal collapse. This is not an overstatement, in my opinion, as the statistics are mind-boggling— one in five Americans are on psychiatric drugs. One in five. By my calculations, this means that 62,913,200 people ingest mind-altering, body-altering, spirit-altering pills they believe to be “medications” on a daily basis.

Can a Profession Be any More Confused?

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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).

It’s Time For A Stronger Political Ground Game To Compete With NAMI & Company...

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The seemingly unstoppable political alliance made up of NAMI, the American Psychiatric Association (which represents 24,000 psychiatrists), the financial lobbying power of the corporate drug industry, and a chorus of fear-mongering politicians, achieved a great political victory this week when president Obama signed the Medicaid DocFix legislation into law.

Driving Us Crazy: A Festival About Madness in Society, and in All of Us

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I am proud and happy to announce that our webpage DrivingUsCrazy was launched today. It will help us to get the word out about the international film festival taking place in Gothenburg, 16-18 October, 2015, and also to highlight the issue of madness every day until then — and hopefully for many days afterwards.

Reflections on How We Think About and Respond to Human Suffering, Existential Pain, and...

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Any attempt to establish an alternative diagnostic system to the predominantly biologic DSM-5 classifications or to initiate a transformation of the individually oriented mental health treatment systems needs to critically explore how, not only what, we think about health and healing, about mental and emotional suffering, about traumatic experiences and injustices, and the multiple forms of pain that are part of our human existence. The broad critique of the DSM-5 by so many national and international organizations and individual colleagues will in the end not be powerful and far reaching enough without this inquiry into the foundations of our thinking and without reflection about our ways of thinking.

Spirituality and ‘Mental Illness’

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Is the suppression of spirituality in the West the reason for our struggle and suffering labeled as mental illness? Are we medicated to numb the pain and psychospiritual protest related to the felt wrongness in our modern lives? Here’s what I learned from my trip to India.
long-acting medications pharmaceutical industry

A Guide to Long-Acting Neuroleptics: Education or Promotion?

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The National Council for Behavioral Health has released a new pamphlet titled “Guide to Long-Acting Medications for Providers and Organizations.” By downplaying some aspects of the available science, the pamphlet implicitly acts as a promotional tool for the pharmaceutical industry.
group therapy

“Be Kind to Yourself… For Us!”

Ann: "I’ve fallen in love! With my group! And they’re in love with me!" Hugh: "The group and you have an important relationship that you’re creating together week after week. This includes breaking down the authoritarian boundaries that keep people in their “places” so that they can’t grow."

Recovery through Learning Creatura, a Language of Life

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There is a language underneath our familiar verbal language. Ordinarily it is called nonverbal communication. It is also called body language. I came to...

Nothing About Us Without Us!

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As we prepared for our regular monthly Board meeting, a casually dressed middle-aged man entered the room.  I didn’t recognize him.  I was struck...

CRPD Defeated in Senate – What Now?

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Yesterday December 4, 2012, the U.S. Senate failed to ratify the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities by a 2/3 vote.  Right...

My Story of Recovery: Prayer, Community, and Healing

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In his book, Prayer is Good Medicine, physician and researcher Larry Dossey maintains that praying for one's self or others can make a scientifically measurable difference in recovering from illness or trauma. It is one thing to understand such a healing intellectually; it is another to know it from experience. Such an experience came to me in the fall of 1996.

Housing First: An Evidence-Based Approach Beyond the Medical Model

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For each person not sent to a state or federal prison, about $30,000 a year is saved. By starting a War on Mental Illness just as the War on Drugs is wrapping up, some mental health advocates hope to cash in on prison reform. Of course, many Americans might prefer to cash in through lower taxes. So it is essential — if the War on Mental Illness is to succeed — that Rep Murphy create a link in the public imagination between senseless acts of violence and psychiatric diagnosis. Although Murphy acknowledges that there is no empirical data linking psychiatric diagnosis and violence, he hopes to find a link between “untreated serious mental illness” and violence.

A Confession, and a Dilemma

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In reviewing the classes I took in graduate school, nowhere was I taught that mental disorders are an illness arising from a chemical imbalance which needs to be treated with medication. If my university professors did not teach it, then where did I learn it? The answer lies in working in the field itself and hearing it from supervisors and other colleagues. But where did they learn it? Why do we to continue to blindly go along without questioning whether or not any of this makes sense or is helpful? We need to do better.

The Making of Codex Alternus: What We Can Learn About Research on Non-Traditional Psychiatric...

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In August of 2011 I started working on a document about alternative treatments for “schizophrenia” while taking a class on Microsoft Word at a local college. The document was about 20 pages long when I finished, and Dan Stradford posted the article on Safe Harbor. It is still there today and is one of the most viewed articles on the Safe Harbor website. I decided to turn it into a book: “Codex Alternus: A Research Collection of Alternative and Complementary Treatments for Schizophrenia, Bipolar Disorder and Associated Drug-Induced Side Effects
smartphones

More Bad News About Smartphones – When Will We Heed the Warnings?

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We might expect that there would be a reasonable response to an overwhelming body of evidence that our tech usage patterns must be altered or consequences will only become more dismal. Yet as we are learning, trends seem to be running contrary to what the advice begs us to consider.
genetic code

Debunking The Latest Gene Study

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The researchers suggest that their finding implies a common genetic cause behind five different “disorders.” This is big news! If true, it validates the biomedical view of mental “illness” and suggests that future medical treatments could “cure” these conditions. However, that grand conclusion is not supported by the data.

November 1, 2010

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Bob-- Since we've started posting these letters, I've had a number of readers responding to me and asking about my strategies for withdrawal. As you...

Rediscovering Traditions of Community Healing – Susan McKeown

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Is poetry the way to truly understand madness? Do rituals and music -- such as Ireland's tradition of keening -- have the power to heal emotional suffering? Susan McKeown, Grammy award-winning singer/songwriter and folklorist, supported her partner through an extreme state. She began a journey to uncover intergenerational trauma in her family and in the history of her native Ireland, and was inspired to set poems about madness to music.

When “Recovery” Feels Like a Trap

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People in roles of power in the mental health system often don’t realize how much complicity they have in actually creating the symptoms they claim are biologically-based in individuals with psychiatric labels.

Connecticut State in Mental Health Denial

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The recent July 9th Ct. Mirror article, Children Stuck in Crisis, accomplishes the intended purpose of deceptively convincing the people of Connecticut that there’s a severe mental health services crisis in the state. On the surface, the article’s author provides a compelling scenario of the state’s youth failing to get the needed mental health care and forced to rely on emergency room services. The problem with the presentation is the failure to address a key piece of information in the reported mental-health-crisis-puzzle – the increased psychiatric drugging of Connecticut’s children.

Winning Friends and Influencing People

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Some readers of Mad in America may be aware that Scientific American published a short blog by me on 17th November 2014 - Why We Need to Abandon the Disease-Model of Mental Health Care. This blog was rather wonderfully (and slightly embarrassingly) described by Phil Hickey on his website, Behaviorism and Mental Health, as “an important milestone.” My blog attempts to summarise many of the key points of a perspective widely shared on Mad in America: