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).

It Gets Better: A Portrait of Poly Psychopharmacology

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The “It gets better” collection will be a series of republished posts on my website, Beyond Meds, from when I was gravely ill from the psych drug withdrawal process and the following protracted psychiatric drug withdrawal syndrome. So many folks out there are now going through the heinous process of finding their way through psychiatric drug withdrawal syndrome and other iatrogenic injuries from psychiatric drugging. While many find their way through after weeks or months, for others it can take years to really get out of the deep disability and darkness it creates. I’m going to start reposting my personal pieces from those difficult days, so that people can see how far I’ve come and find hope that they too might come out of that darkness and find some peace and joy again.

Eugenics & the 2014 Murphy Bill

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Sterilization of the “unfit” and proposals to help families with a mental health crisis may seem to be disparate topics, certainly one historically more repugnant than the other. Yet, the two “solutions” have several things in common: The absence of choice by the individual affected, the paternalistic assumption that those with power know what is needed, both serve the interests of families, caretakers, guardians, and conservators, and both proceed out of good intentions.

Top Psychiatrist’s Stunning Announcement About Gun Violence

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After each highly publicized gun violence incident, some lawmakers—whether with good intention, for political gain, or both—declare that we must have laws to keep guns out of the hands of people with mental illness. It is therefore stunning and profoundly important to note Sunday's blog post from the American Psychiatric Association's president, Dr. Renee Binder.

How Psychiatry Almost Stopped Burning Man: A Story of Hell and Liberation

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As Burning Man nears its 30th anniversary, USA Today has published an article attempting to explain how this still somewhat freakish event came into existence. I enjoyed the article, but as someone involved in the origin story it tells, I believe that an important piece is being left out. This relates to how misguided “mental health treatment” came close to disabling a key organizer of the early Burning Man. This piece is a fascinating tale in itself, but more fascinating when considered as just one example of how a flawed approach to mental health treatment forms a barrier to many forms of cultural evolution and renewal, with oppressive consequences for society as a whole.
psychotherapy hints

The Hints That Psychotherapy Clients Drop

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Clients regularly hint in passing at what’s causing their distress. The hints we get from a client help us determine which of these many causes are more probable than the others or maybe even which is the cause. Nor is it hard to hear these hints, if we train ourselves to listen for them. Responding to causal hints with a spirit of inquiry and careful talking points deepens the work.

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.

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).

Is Motivation Worth More Than Expertise?

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The strongest evidence we have as to whether a drug causes a problem does not come from RCTs or any other controlled study but rather from good clinical accounts. Even if RCTs were done by angels, so there was no hiding, no miscoding, nothing untoward, RCTs can still hide adverse events. The onus is on large and powerful corporations who have a lot of resources to pinpoint the populations where the benefit is likely to exceed the risk, if they want to continue to make money out of vulnerable people.

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.

Going On or Off Psych Drugs: One Reason or Many?

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Many people report having one reason to go off psychiatric drugs—feeling that they just know they need to, sensing they will die if they don’t come off, etc. It is far less common to hear of someone going on psych drugs because they know they must.

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.

Snake Medicine: Transforming Our Stories

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The stories we tell ourselves and others have the power to heal or to harm. This is a story about how we define mental health, the challenges we face in pursuit of it, and the power of transforming our stories.

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...

Using Formulation to Change Team Cultures

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I am returning to the subject of psychological formulation after rather a lengthy gap, during which controversy about the forthcoming 5th edition of DSM has continued to grow – sign the petition ‘Stop the Insanity’ at  www.dsm5response.com if you share others’ concerns about the creeping medicalisation of everyday life and the risks that it poses.

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...

A Tribute to Stephen Gilbert, Warrior Behind Enemy Lines

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Stephen Boren, who posted here under the name Stephen Gilbert, passed away November 12 after a battle with cancer. Stephen offered a unique perspective, working as peer support staff at the same hospital where he had once been held as a patient. We will miss his daily presence on MIA.
Madwomen in the Attic logo

Making a Mad Community, from Attic to Attic: Part One

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This two-part piece outlines our struggle to build a mad community, Madwomen in the Attic, across locations, across differences, across challenges.

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.