Blogs

The Low Histamine Chef published a post yesterday: The vagus nerve inflammation connection. I was tickled to get a list of various self-hacks on how to stimulate the vagus nerve. Once the vagus nerve is stimulated we calm down! It’s like magic. The vagus nerve is implicated in all sorts of stress.

The psychiatrists have fought really hard to hide the terrible truth that depression pills double the risk of suicide, not only in children but also in adults.

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.

Each of us is a real human being dealing with real circumstances and experiencing the passage of time. Each knitted together as a multiplicity, smiling one moment and dreaming of revenge the next, oblivious to the world one moment and marching in protest the next, selfless one moment and selfish the next. Labels do not capture this reality.

Most people reading this blog will have heard or read the quotation attributed to Hippocrates: “Let food be thy medicine, and medicine be thy food.” Whether or not this ancient Greek physician actually made that comment 2500 years ago is something that we cannot determine. But it certainly is a statement that is coming back into favor in the current era.

Urging aviation students at the summit to seek help if they need it is a noble cause, but it sounds hollow when the FAA regulations are built on stigma.

With the increasing medicalization of depression, and as more and more physicians see the treatment of depression as falling under their purview, it is imperative to distinguish between actual clinical depression and "healthy depression" — the adaptive and expectable responses to distressing life events that signal a need for rethinking one's life and recalibrating one's self-perceptions and emotions.

More than 200 people signed an open letter to the FDA requesting electroconvulsive therapy’s safety studies and electrical dosing protocols.

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.

For the last forty years, psychiatry has been comprehensively critiqued from a myriad of disciplines including sociology, psychology, and the user movement. Is there anything that can be salvaged from the psychiatry project? How would a psychiatrist practice ethically in such a nefarious environment?

As both a pediatrician and psychoanalyst, D.W. Winnicott had a unique view of human development. In preparation for teaching a course on early childhood mental health I had the pleasure of reconnecting with the profound wisdom of his writings. While Winnicott wrote extensively for both a general and a professional audience, I discovered, on careful re-reading of his essay for a general audience entitled ""The Ordinary Devoted Mother"" that it contains a vast wealth of ideas, foreshadowing contemporary research at the intersection of developmental psychology, neuroscience and genetics that is revealing more every day of how early experience gets into the body and brain.

Despite the fact that no one in history, not even the omnipotent American Psychiatric Association -- which produces and profits mightily from the "Bible" of mental disorders -- has come up with a halfway good definition of "mental illness," and despite the fact that the process of creating and applying the labels of mental illness is unscientific, any of those labels can be used to deprive the person so labeled of their human rights. This is terrifying. It ought to terrify those who are so labeled and those who are not, because deprivation of human rights on totally arbitrary grounds is inhumane and immoral.

This is not just about pregnancy loss and motherhood. This is reflective of how we treat many people who have experienced pain and are expressing it in ways not immediately relatable to those around them. It is about how we as a society may contribute to some of the truly awful things that happen not by failing to properly screen and assess, but by quite successfully fostering fear and alienation.

Over the last decade, people have commonly made statements to me of the ilk — “What bugs me about antipsychiatry people is they only care about tearing down; there is no commitment to actually helping people” — Which suggests that there is a serious dearth of awareness about antipsychiatry.

An Imaginary Conversation Between a World Health Organization Mental Health Provider and an Indigenous Scientist

People have been wondering on this site lately if there is still a role for psychiatrists. The short answer is maybe, if they can...

The studies that the FDA relied upon for adults over age 24 were dismally flawed and untrustworthy compared to the ones used for children. The child studies showed that antidepressants can cause suicidality — the adult studies showed nothing other than FDA collusion with drug companies.

What worked for participants is the compassionate, welcoming, inclusive and non-judgmental approach of DDA. It is about peer support, role modelling, hope, building skills… acquiring self-confidence and building a new identity.

When I first interviewed Brandon Banks, in the spring of 2008, while researching Anatomy of an Epidemic, he had recently entered Elizabethtown Community College...

Every day we read, on the one hand, another compelling headline touting "news" of a “scientific breakthrough” that claims to have discovered the “cause” of “mental illness,” while another headline tells of researchers uncovering egregious falsification in the clinical trials of the pharmaceutical industry. The list goes on and on. Though many people report that they find medications helpful when they are in an extreme state (mostly to help them sleep ), given that there is as yet no scientific evidence confirming a specific disease/illness process underlying "mental illness,” and evidence that most if not all of the perceived effect is comparable to placebo, the fact remains that any positive effect of these meds are based on theory, while their harms are well-established.

Last week was my anniversary off a huge psych drug cocktail I’d been on for 20 years. In this video I speak to the inner resources that kept me going. The fact is there is nothing in society to help those who love us to understand what we are going through.

Mad in the UK describes its mission as “Fundamentally re-thinking UK mental health practice and promoting positive change.”

I read some Hegel in a reading group a few years ago and was bowled over by it. So I was excited to find a book that analyses Hegel’s ideas about the nature of madness, and wanted to review it even though it was written 20 years ago. Hegel may not have been the first to have made this point, but for me his writing brings home, more clearly than any other thinker, the intrinsically social nature of human thought and existence.

The latest endorsement of claims from research on twins reared apart comes from cancer physician and researcher Siddhartha Mukherjee, who published an article in the May 2, 2016 edition of The New Yorker entitled “Same but Different: How Epigenetics can Blur the Line between Nature and Nurture.” Mukherjee is an influential author due to his medical credentials, accessible writing style, promotion by the mainstream media, and award-winning book. Unfortunately, Mukherjee is only one of many authoritative authors to misreport the methods and findings of human genetic research.

If we are going to really make a difference in the world of mental health stigma, we must get to the heart of the matter. All people deserve compassionate, honest care. All people, stigmatized and stigmatizers, deserve to be heard, understood, and valued, no matter what worth that society may place on them. I am my brother’s keeper. You are mine.