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).

Krazy Kiwi Kids

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The New Zealand government has just published research showing the numbers of children aged 2-14 years being diagnosed with mental disorders has doubled in the last five years with the key driver being an increase in anxiety disorders.

A Breakthrough for Suicide (Attempt) Survivors at the AAS

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The American Association of Suicidology (AAS) has created a blog for suicide attempt survivors. By seeking out and actually welcoming the survivor voice, for the first time anywhere in the world by a mainstream suicide organisation, this represents a global breakthrough in the field.

The Hearing Voices Movement: In Response to a Father – ‘My Daughter, the Schizophrenic’

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There was a heart-breaking and disturbing story in yesterday’s Guardian newspaper entitled, My Daughter, the Schizophrenic’, which featured edited extracts from a book written by the father of a child called Jani. He describes how Jani is admitted into a psychiatric hospital when she is 5, diagnosed with schizophrenia when she is 6 and by the time she is 7, she has been put on a potent cocktail of psychotropic medications.

What is Critical Psychiatry?

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Over the last twenty years there has emerged a body of work that questions the assumptions that lie beneath psychiatric knowledge and practice. This work, appearing as academic papers, magazine articles, books, and chapters in books, hasn’t been written by academics, sociologists or cultural theorists. It has emerged from the pens and practice of a group of British psychiatrists.

Taking Martin Luther King Jr’s Call For Creative Maladjustment Seriously

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Martin Luther King, Jr. once said "There are some things in our nation and in our world to which I'm proud to be maladjusted… I never intend to adjust myself to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to become adjusted to religious bigotry. I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few, and leave millions of people perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of prosperity. I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism, and to the self-defeating effects of physical violence... And I call upon you to be maladjusted to these things until the good society is realized…

Luscious Lipids

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Since the 1950’s, we’ve been told that eating fat makes you fat and that avoiding traditional fats (i.e. butter, animal meats, lard, eggs) in lieu of industrialized, man-made fat substitutes is highly recommended. Why did we agree to disavow several millennia of instinctive eating in favor of a high carb and sugar diet, deficient in this staple?

NCMHR Does Not Speak for Me

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I am appalled to read a press release by the National Coalition for Mental Health Recovery that lauds the proposals emerging from the Vice President's Task Force and accepts in principle a national database of individuals with mental health diagnoses that is "limited to those with a known history of violence."

What Happened After a Nation Methodically Murdered Its Schizophrenics? Rethinking Mental Illness and Its...

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When we begin to question, we discover that (1) scientifically flawed research has been used to promote ideas around mental illness and its heritability, and (2) instead of focusing on nature vs. nurture causes of mental illness, it’s time to consider whether certain phenomena are really symptoms of pathology or instead are inextricable aspects of our humanity.

Youth Violence is a Family Therapy Issue

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Family therapists view violent young people in the context of the wider social systems of which they are a part. This typically means the youth’s parents, but it can also include grandparents, teachers, or even friends. Framing youth violence in terms of the social context or family system--rather than as a psychological problem of the individual-- is the most effective way of putting an end to the violent behavior.

And That’s the News from the Department of Psychiatry

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In the business of clinical trials, the most valuable commodities are the research subjects. Filling clinical trials is hard, and filling them quickly is even harder. That’s why in 2000 a clinical investigator told the HHS Office of the Inspector General that research sponsors were looking for three things from research sites: “No. 1—rapid enrollment. No. 2 — rapid enrollment. No. 3 — rapid enrollment.”

Day of Action to Stop Psychiatric Profiling: January 21, 2013

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As politicians, media, and pro-gun and anti-gun lobbies all converge to agree on one thing, that those of us labeled mentally ill are fair game for dumping blame on and restricting of our civil liberties and constitutional rights, despite the fact that there is no rational evidence for such profiling - our community is responding with grief and anger.

Free from Harm? Reflecting on the Dangers of the White House’s Proposed ‘Now...

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“And so what we should be thinking about is our responsibility to care for and shield them from harm and give them the...

Psychiatry Is Not the Only Branch of Medicine to Lose Its Soul to Pharma

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In the present climate, the truth proves elusive. Almost all clinical studies of various drugs are designed and funded by the pharmaceutical companies. Only the studies which support efficacy of a drug are published while the more numerous negative studies are rarely acknowledged. While companies are supposed to register the studies they are conducting so that planned timing of study endpoints are public knowledge, these requirements are often ignored.

The Problem with PTSD

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“The voices, they tell me they gonna kill me, and it’s my fault.” “Sometimes, when we hear voices, they just reflect our own anxieties, sometimes they can echo things we’ve been told in the past. When the voices tell you that they’re going to kill you, does that echo anything you may have been told in the past?” I ask.

“Baby Cry Too Much?”

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This is the second in my new series, “Haiku for social change”, the first having appeared on my own blog page. Since this piece is about pharmacology and psychopharmacology, I think MIA is a good home for it.

Civilians

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If you’ve ever driven your car in a blizzard, you realize that the biggest hazard isn’t the snow or ice on the road; it’s mostly other drivers. You of course have your own vehicle (and welfare) to look out for, and it’s certainly stressful driving slowly, keeping traction on the slippery tarmac, maintaining concentration, watching out for black ice, and so on. But these variables remain somewhat under your control. Other drivers; not so much.

False Arguments: A Three-Part Story

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In my experience, the world of ‘mental health’ is absolutely overloaded with what I like to call ‘false arguments.’ Literally every day, people are engaged in debates without ever questioning the premises upon which those debates are founded. It’s akin to my husband approaching me and inquiring, “Hey, should we fill our one-year-old daughter’s sippy cup with Pepsi or Coca Cola today?”

More Thinking about Alternatives to Psychiatric Diagnosis

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In my last post, I argued that the single most damaging effect of psychiatric diagnosis is loss of meaning. By ruthlessly divesting experiences of their personal, social and cultural significance, diagnosis turns ‘people with problems’ into ‘patients with illnesses.’ Horrifying stories of trauma, abuse, discrimination and deprivation are sealed off behind a pseudo-medical label as the individual is launched on what is often a lifelong journey of disability, exclusion and despair.

Exporting Depression

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When people ask me how I began working on my last book, Crazy Like Us, I tell them about meeting Dr. Laurence Kirmayer at McGill University back in 2005. He took time one afternoon to tell me a remarkable story about a personal encounter he had with the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline and the remarkable resources that the company employed over the last decade to make their antidepressant pill Paxil a best seller in Japan.

PsychRights’ Letter to the President’s Task Force on Gun Violence

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I am flattered and pleased to have been asked by MadInAmerica to post here the letter PsychRights wrote Monday to Vice President Biden regarding the misguided, counterproductive and very dangerous focus on identifying and forcing "treatment" on people diagnosed with mental illness as any part of the solution to gun violence in the United States.

Commentary on the National Comorbidity Survey Replication

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An article in the New York Times reported on a publication in JAMA Psychiatry that presented the results of a reanalysis of data from the National Comorbidity Survey Replication Adolescent Supplement. The results suggest that the vast majority of those adolescents who might attempt suicide are already in treatment. This should discourage efforts to identify even more children at risk and get them in to treatment if the rationale for screening is to prevent suicide attempts.

How to Get Away with Academic Misconduct at the University of Minnesota

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In early 2009, antipsychotic fraud was making headlines.  Eli Lilly had announced in January that it would plead guilty to charges that it had...

The Hearing Voices Movement: Beyond Critiquing the Status Quo

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We have just celebrated the anniversary of the rapidly expanding global Hearing Voices Movement which was founded more than twenty-five years ago following the ground-breaking research of Professor Marius Romme and Dr Sandra Escher. Romme and Escher have advocated for a radical shift in the way we understand the phenomenon of Hearing Voices; in contrast to traditional, biomedical psychiatry which views voices as an aberrant by-product of genetic, brain and cognitive faults, their research has firmly established that voices make sense when taking into account the traumatic circumstances that frequently provoke them.

Backsliding in the Bay State

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The drumbeat for more "Risk Management" just gets louder. And nowhere is this so alarmingly evident as a new policy proposed by the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health (DMH) in November 2012.

Thinking about Alternatives to Psychiatric Diagnosis

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I want to follow up my first post by outlining the principles of possible alternatives to psychiatric diagnosis – that is, alternatives in addition to the most obvious one, which is simply to stop diagnosing people.