Blogs

Locomún, a collective group in Spain, has launched MIA-Hispanohablante, an affiliated web magazine for the 400 million people who share Spanish as their first language.

Applying the methods of natural science to human activity is sometimes necessary, but it cannot enlighten us about the nature of that activity or the reasons that motivate and sustain it. Instead, insights must come from our own and others’ experiences.

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

On March 26^th, a small group of us gathered outside the State House in Boston, Massachusetts, to rally and protest against several oppressive, dehumanizing, and dangerous bills put forth by the House and Senate.  If you’re interested in reading more about them, go to www.malegislature.gov/Bills, and search for House Bills 110, 141, 1802, 3253, 1792, and Senate Bill 41.  This is my speech from the event.

For a scathing, 11-minute overview of the death of Dan Markingson at the University of Minnesota, and new allegations of coercion into psychiatric clinical trials, you can't do much better than this excellent investigative report by Jeff Baillon.

The distribution and demand for psychiatric drugs is at its highest level since their first introduction over 50 years ago. As part of our culture of addiction modern psychiatry, in collusion with the pharmaceutical industry, has greatly expanded and increased the demand for their own particular versions of legal and highly profitable mind altering substances. This demand has become so great that even if the current medical establishment wanted to reverse this trend (something that will never happen), they would now face tremendous outrage from a mass of desperate consumers.

The childhood and psychiatric abuse altered my neurological, hormonal and other bodily functions and it was difficult to say which abuse left what mark. The doctors used medication to fix the changes and the taking of prescription pills became a habit. I took pills to calm me, pills to sleep, and pills to make me happy. A few months after stopping all medications, I was a bundle of nerves and I opened the cupboard for a pill. Living on autopilot as I had been doing for so long had to stop. I switched gears from absentmindedly resorting to pills, to purposefully calming myself without using drugs by breathing the way the psychologist had taught me.

Good Pharma is the story of the Mario Negri Institute. Mario Negri was a wealthy patron who on his death in 1960 bequeathed a large sum of money to support independent pharmaceutical research to an upcoming researcher Silvio Garattini. Garattini and Alfredo Leonardi set about building an Institute centred on the new drugs and new techniques. They continue to grow without ever having patented any of their many discoveries or concealing any of the data from experiments that didn’t work out or accommodating any of their trials to industry’s wishes.

There has been quite a bit going on in the UK mental health world of late, and MiA already shares some of this in the form of open letters from Anne Cooke, et al. and Richard Bentall. Both are responses to a series of BBC programmes. In their letter Kinderman, et al. also make reference to a recently published report; The Five Year Forward View for Mental Health. This has been published by a so-called independent body; The Mental Health Taskforce to the NHS in England. Readers would find it encouraging; it refers to a need for closer attention to early intervention, to the need to address stigma, for a focus upon life’s transitions, and innovations that could support recovery, personal autonomy and well-being. What happened? Nothing!

Science is supposed to be evidence-respecting and thereby open-minded; psychiatry is presently not. But is psychiatry really unique in this respect? Is it the only field of medicine where dogmatically held theories contrary to evidence have held sway for long periods?

When people have "paranoia" or "persecutory voices," often with a bit of curiosity I discover people in their lives who actually are out to get them. Real bullies, real persecutors. And then the work becomes work that all survivors — diagnosed with psychosis or not — have to do to regain safety, trust, and empowerment.

In March, the United Nations Human Rights Committee asked the U.S. to explain how it sees nonconsensual medication in psychiatric institutions as being compliant with Article 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which prohibits torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment (including nonconsensual medical and scientific experimentation). A group of grass roots survivor activists have sent a report on forced drugging in the U.S (along with an executive summary) to the Committee.

On April 1, 2014, Slate published an online article titled Mitochondrial Disease or Medical Child Abuse?  The article tries to explore the central question in Justina's case:  does she have mitochondrial disease or is she a victim of medical child abuse?

My first real introduction to the world of madness and “mental illness” was when I was 21 years old and I left home to start my mental health nurse training. Reflecting on my own experiences has led me to consider how the trauma of participating in the psychiatric system can affect the way we care for others.

Now, personality tests are being used to determine which side of the wealth gap people will fall on. Who you are is not neutral — the lens your personality-test results will be viewed through is: “are you a good worker?” Any definition of this will likely exclude psychiatric survivors, those labeled by the DSM and those who see, think, hear, speak and feel differently.

For many people, the current political situation around the world is intensely frightening and not without cause. Depression and anxiety are on the rise, but we need a social model revolution in order to look at why this is happening. Labels like Trump Anxiety Disorder are merely a way to put people’s concerns in a box and leave them unaddressed.

Imagine for a moment that you are seriously injured in a medical research study and require expensive medical care.   Imagine further that the study...

Members and supporters of Free Britney America staged their third demonstration so far this year in Washington, DC, in support of ending conservatorships.

A recent article, "Screw Positive Thinking! Why Our Quest for Happiness Is Making Us Miserable" provides humorous perspective on the ways seeking too hard after happiness can make us unhappy - and, it seems, stupid as well! I'm going to argue that the same paradox also applies to other aspects of mental health, and that some of the major problems in current mental health treatment result from failing to take this into account.

In a recent Huffington Post blog — republished at Mad In America — prominent psychiatrist Allen Frances declared: “Psychiatric coercion has become largely a paper tiger: rare, short-term, and usually a well-meaning attempt to help the person avoid the real modern-day coercive threat of imprisonment.” With Representative Tim Murphy’s bill — advocating for court-ordered “outpatient” psychiatric compliance — locked in committee, it is tempting to believe that Frances might be right. Does Murphy’s bill look scary to us, but actually lack any real teeth?

It can be difficult to pinpoint transitions. The Rubicon that led from a Medical Republic to a Pharmaceutical Empire was crossed in 1962 with the passage of the Amendments to the Food and Drugs Act. This act put in place an apparatus of controlled trials, prescription-only status and disease indications that laid the basis for a global pharmaceutical hegemony, although the drift to Empire could still have been stopped at this point.

So many treatment colleagues have shared that prior to finding an approach that really works to turn a child’s intensity to greatness, they felt no recourse other that to look for ways to moderate the accelerating poor choices that children they worked with were making. Most relevant here is, that in retrospect, they felt that it boiled down to simply being faithful to their training, which it turns out so often is a set up to fail with difficult children.

Is the Food and Drug Administration violating its own mandate to approve safe drugs? That was the question that Donald Light, co-author of The...

Shortly after I posted a two-part blog on this site back in February about New York’s just-approved Medicaid Health Homes, I got this crazy,...

It’s time to speak about what is happening with the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in the United States. I have been...