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I do not understand how we can continue to avoid the conversation about psychiatric medications and their role in the violence that is affecting far too many of our children, whether Seung-Hui Cho, Eric Harris, Kip Kinkel, or Jeff Weise (all of whom were either taking or withdrawing from psychotropic medications) or the scores of children and adults they have killed and harmed. It is not clear what role medications played in the Newtown tragedy, though news reports are now suggesting there is one.

I woke up this morning and there it was again, "I Am Adam Lanza's Mother." This essay is all over the internet, written by a woman who is using her personal story about experiences with her “mentally ill” son, whom she is “terrified of,” to appeal for more dialogue on the issue of mental health. As I write this, her son's picture has been viewed by over a million people. They have read her accounts of what may be some of these young man’s most painful childhood memories.

We have long been told that “low levels” of serotonin in the brain equal bad and sad, and we have been educated by the Pharmaceutical industry about the opportunity we have, through the use of antidepressants, to retrain our wayward neurons: by making the proverbial holes in the strainer that much smaller. But even if you accept the conventional wisdom regarding the role of serotonin in the narrative of mind, merriness, and misery, from where do we think that this magical neurochemical arises?

We poison ever growing numbers of children with chemicals known to cause aggression and suicidality. We routinely drug children with these so they’ll sit still and be quiet in classrooms. Now, we drug babies for crying and 3 year olds for acting frightened while locked away from their families in day care centers. Those unsuccessful in school environments are incarcerated. It 's a well-worn path.

As I write these words on a Monday evening, my spirit aches.  It aches with grief for the lives lost in Connecticut last week; it aches with dread for our collective American future in Sandy Hook’s aftermath; and it aches with love and empathy for Michael, a thirteen-year old boy whose once private life has, for the last day and a half, been on display for millions to see, exploited by a mother whose opinions are representative of America’s most pervasive mass delusion: that “mental illness” is a biologically-based condition requiring psychopharmaceutical “treatment” and “mental health care”, and that “the mentally ill” are a class of Other that threatens the safety, security, and health of America.

I had the best of intentions of sitting down Friday morning (12/14) to write about how faith — belief in myself, intrinsic healing, and the basic goodness of the universe — helped me through withdrawal from psychoactive medications. Then, the woman who was going to watch our son couldn’t make it due to car trouble, so I decided to take the little man out in his stroller. Before I left, I checked email and saw a brief flicker on Yahoo about a “school shooting in Connecticut.”

As many of the readers of this website know, David Oaks, the long-time leader of MindFreedom, was badly injured when he fell from a ladder on December 1. He broke a bone in his neck, his injury so severe he had to be on a ventilator. The latest news is encouraging: he had a tracheotomy and is off the ventilator, able now to speak in a whisper. Personally, I owe David a great deal, as it was an interview I did with him in 1998 that propelled me to write more in-depth about psychiatry.

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.

This shorter-than-usual contribution signifies a departure from my earlier blogs. It is the first in an occasional series that uses semi-fictional clinical narratives to examine some of the difficulties that face people who use psychiatric services in England, and the psychiatrists and other mental health professionals who work in them.

Today I paid a visit to the Managing Director of Mylan Pharmaceuticals, Lloyd Price. Mylan is the company that manufactured the antidepressant Fluox1 which, according to the NZ government, is the most likely cause of my son's suicide. My dealings with Mylan in the time since Toran died have not been entirely fruitful.

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.

I was a chemical and diagnostic sewer. Never, ever have I been sicker, more depressed, more anxious, or more confused than while medicated or struggling to quit a psychiatric medication. For me, the bugaboo was benzodiazepines, and after seven years of continuous use that climbed to four mg of clonazepam a day, I went through a living nightmare to quit, made all the worse by further drugging and red-herring misdiagnoses of mania, mood cycling, and major depression.

It is not the responsibility of those exposed to demonstrate danger, it is the responsibility of pharmaceutical, commercial, and industrial companies to properly evaluate the long-term safety of such exposures, including an evaluation of the severe risks to a potentially genetically vulnerable minority. Only then can a governing body be in a position to sanction, condone, or even promote such chemicals.

When plans for the DSM-5 were first announced about ten years ago, most folks’ reaction was “Why?”. Many of us asked that same question several times as the publication date for the new tome kept on getting pushed back. Finally, the curtain enshrouding the DSM-5 Task Force and its several committees began to part and proposed revisions/additions began to appear on its website. To our dismay, we found our question answered.

It seems that all the wants I have now for going and doing are a drug withdrawal, of sorts. I have been hooked, addicted to motion, fed on credits, isolated from the earth, from my humanity and from myself.

Hope heals. Thousand of years of experience and, more recently, numerous hope studies, prove this to be true. Yet hope is still a 4-letter word in many mental health settings. How can we build a bridge to hope from hope-stealing physical and emotional pain, hopeless diagnoses and prognoses, and hope-numbing side effects?

Recently, two more waves of criticism have broken onto the beach of opinion concerning mental health services and practice. Allen Frances has mourned approval of DSM-5 in his Psychology Today blog and the British Journal of Psychiatry has published a paper by members of the UK Critical Psychiatry Network. What is notable about both of these is that they give further voice to criticism of conventional mental health services by those who have spent years providing and researching them.

How does it feel to live free of psychiatric medications and the shackles of any attendant diagnoses after years of dependency, both on the drugs and the system? And perhaps more importantly, how did I persist through the hell of withdrawal and reintegrate into the world in a meaningful way, all the while with no guarantee that it might ever happen? Upon deliberately leaving behind the doctors and the hospitals, I wrote my own discharge plan, since theirs — a chemical straitjacket of manmade molecules — wasn’t working for me.

The recent research scandals out of the University of Minnesota’s Department of Psychiatry may be alarming, but they are not new. Back in the 1990s, when the university was working its way towards a crippling probation by the National Institutes of Health (for yet another episode of misconduct (this time in the Department of Surgery), the Department of Psychiatry hosted two spectacular cases of research wrongdoing, both of which resulted in faculty members being disqualified from conducting research by the FDA.

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...

Yes, a psychiatric diagnosis can be a dangerous thing to have. But, these days, so is having any medical diagnosis. The names and words of the diagnoses themselves are not so much to blame for the harm. Rather, the harm comes through the ways the diagnoses are created and how they are used.

As embodied in the U.S. Constitution, all levels of government have two types of power which enables them to make and enforce laws : police power, which empowers them to protect the individuals who live within their jurisdictions, and what is deemed parental power, formally parens patriae, which allows government to protect those individuals who can’t protect themselves.

Some of you might know me from co-founding The Icarus Project, an online community, real-life support network, and alternative media project by and for people living with the complex gifts that are too often labeled as “mental illness.” Some of you might not know that I'm also a poet. I've been asked to share my work here on Mad in America. This first poem I'm going to offer you is about trauma and resilience; the ways that the world breaks our hearts, and the ways we survive to find our voices again.

Those of us with lived experience, here in the US and now around the world have discovered that most mental health professionals have little understanding of what extreme mental states are like. They think those states are a sign of illness. They think that hearing voices and having vivid dreams are symptoms of those illnesses. We who have been through our own recovery know that we are all basically healthy people who have experienced a variety of traumas.

If involuntary outpatient commitment, popularly known as Kendra’s Law, is to be ended in New York when it sunsets or expires in 2015, the reductive stereotypes used to characterize the individuals most likely to be affected, viz., those persons labeled with serious mental illnesses and caught up in the public mental health system, must be discredited and discarded.