Blogs

Six years ago a new neighbor moved into the house across the street. Paul Ellis was his name and we gradually moved from a nodding acquaintance to long conversations about philosophy and then to walking our dogs together. Then one autumn evening Paul told me that he had spent seven years in a forensic psychiatric hospital for killing his father in a substance-induced psychosis.

In any society that prioritizes economic efficiency, productivity and order above life and all of life’s varieties, people experiencing altered and extreme emotional states will be seen as defective and as burdens—monkey wrenches that disturb the societal assembly line.

Last night, 60 Minutes presented the work of Irving Kirsch, who has been researching the placebo effect in antidepressants for many years. We discuss.

Even though it is extremely unlikely that in France we would reach the kinds of percentages we see in the USA, where in some states nearly 10% of children are treated with methylphenidate or other psychostimulants not used in France, overprescription is highly probable. Why?

We hope the Oregon Health Authority can overcome its critics and get back on track to doing what it set out to do: creating peer support respites led by grassroots groups.

According to psychiatry, unhappiness is a medically treatable disease. No need to "pursue" happiness other than by swallowing pills called “antidepressants.”

Did you know you are a key leader of a global peaceful revolution? Surprise! My guess is that many of you reading this may not yet know that you are one of the “Supreme Commanders” of world revolution. In fact, if you wish, and you reflect the values of Martin Luther King, you may say you are leading the organization that he first envisioned, the International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment (IAACM.) Let me explain.

The huge impact of the MISTRA, in addition to the harmful and regressive social and political policy implications that flow from it, necessitates a detailed analysis of the “science” behind the study’s major claims and conclusions. Here I offer a new critique of this famous and influential “separated twin study.”

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” ― Richard...

I lost almost four years of my life, and I’ve not a doubt that it was due to those “life-saving” pills. To that end, they did work. At a time when I was doubled-over with depression, those four prescriptions kept me alive. But then they killed me slowly and brought me back as a stranger.

I’m deeply impressed with the people who made this documentary — I’ve never seen such a creative and well constructed piece of film about non-Western views of psychosis. It skillfully turns the biomedical model of mental illness on its head and shows so many different ways of looking at what we call madness.

Bergner’s piece in The New York Times challenged the illusions of psychiatry. That made some people angry, outraged, or scared. The result is their comments section.

It is hard to step out of the space of diagnoses because of the power it holds. The “doctor” who inflicted on you the awful label of “schizophrenia” or “bipolar” damages you because of the power he holds.

We have lost our ability to tolerate distress, to find meaning in emotion, and purpose in experience. As the sociologist Nicolas Rose has noted, we have recoded our moods in terms of neurochemistry. Emotions no longer have context. They are aberrations in neurochemistry. I’m no longer hurting because I’m lonely, but because I’m running low on endorphins. Buprenorphine for depressive despair reinforces the belief that emotions should be obliterated, and can only be done so through modulating biochemistry.

In many respects it is difficult to fault the report Understanding Psychosis and Schizophrenia, recently published by the British Psychological Society (BPS) and the Division of Clinical Psychology (DCP)[i]; indeed, as recent posts on Mad in America have observed, there is much to admire in it. Whilst not overtly attacking biomedical interpretations of psychosis, it rightly draws attention to the limitations and problems of this model, and points instead to the importance of contexts of adversity, oppression and abuse in understanding psychosis. But the report makes only scant, fleeting references to the role of cultural differences and the complex relationships that are apparent between such differences and individual experiences of psychosis.

When children do things like recoil in fear from monsters and ghosts in their darkened bedroom at night, it’s easy to see the “out of touch with reality” aspect of their experience as being closely related to the faculty that gives them their ability to play – their imagination. We help children through such challenging experiences by being with them, and by playing together, doing things like creating scary images together and then figuring out how to cope with them or laugh at them. In the process we help them explore how to create a world view that works to at least some extent and has room for joy and originality - when their imagination helps them (and maybe others) see the world in new ways.

A group of caring and concerned experts, specializing in mental health, child development, research, and parenting, have started a united movement to help families nationwide. Our effort is called Project #ForTheKids, and our goal "is to dramatically slow down the trend of over diagnosing, labeling and medicating children in the name of mental health."

We all want to help our kids or our students, and sometimes finding the right key to unlock a child’s gifts is a matter of time, patience, trial, and error.

On February 19, 2012, Lesley Stahl’s “Treating depression: is there a placebo effect?” aired on CBS 60 Minutes. Stahl is to be commended for...

I haven’t been a true believer in the psychiatric standard of care for a long time; at some point I became a skeptic. However, I never stopped to consider that my suspicions could be evidence of a "serious mental illness" until it was suggested by my supervisor in a “counseling” meeting. I am not the only one. Many other people have come to the same conclusions I have. Many are articulate and offer compelling evidence.

My mother was once a bright, creative, beautiful young woman, a promising artist and a poet, who was captivated by the hippie movement. She was a creative bohemian artist, defying the conventions of our middle-class Jewish Midwestern family, which had carried a tradition of holding emotions inside and acting stoic. One day, soon after my grandparents’ divorce, she left. She hitched a ride to California, and from that point on, was never the same. The police picked her up on a park bench in Arizona, and she was committed for the first time at age 18. She rotated in and out of mental hospitals, the streets, and jail until her death.

Roxanne fled to Canada, and received formal refugee status, as a psychiatric refugee after being threatened with psychiatric imprisonment and forced drugging in Jamaica.

Shortly after Mad In America launched at the beginning of the year I was invited to take over the site’s web development and to...

I’d like to share a bit about what happened to me after being placed on these medications, and how I successfully got off. Until recently, I was embarrassed to talk about my personal experiences publicly, as I’m a professional who specializes in anxiety and depression. Today, medication free, I feel better than ever before, and I am now on a mission to help my current clients get off medications, and to inform others through my writing about the dangers and pitfalls of starting antidepressants.

What if the key to saving someone is to admit you are powerless to save anyone at all? What would that beckon us to change? A few years ago, I spent a substantial amount of time talking with a man who entered my life because someone in the mental health system told him I might be the one who could save him (or at least, that’s how he heard it). His name was David.