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The invitation from the London Review of Books to review Ben Goldacre’s Bad Pharma™ reads: “We were unsure, at first, what a review could add that isn’t already in the book – scrappy summaries and bits of praise are not for us. The book is of sufficient importance that the main thing is to get someone who knows what they’re talking about to present the material confidently... frame the discussion”. My head said it was inconceivable that the LRB wouldn’t take a review, even if it was at odds with the invitation to praise Bad Pharma. But my gut told me the inconceivable was about to take flesh.

The British Psychological Society's Division of Clinical Psychology has attracted a fair amount of attention in the past year or two by publicly expressing dissatisfaction with psychiatry's so-called diagnostic system. For almost a hundred years, psychologists who work in this field have gone along with the travesty of psychiatric diagnosis, even though the flaws of such a system are clear to anyone with even cursory training in psychology. What the DCP is saying, if I understand them correctly, is that they will no longer play along with this charade.

During the past 29 years I have been diagnosed with anxiety, depression, PTSD, Biploar II and complex PTSD. I have tried numerous drug combinations and have been through ECT several times. None of this helped me. My road to recovery started when I decided to rebel against conventional psychiatry.

Everyone and every group working for mental health justice ought to make fighting global warming a priority right now. Of course, the whole disability movement, and in fact all sentient beings should be concerned about climate crisis, but those of us working for human rights and more choices for mental wellness have special reasons to make this planetary catastrophe a unifying theme for all of us.

The story of "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH" has a great deal of personal significance to me because it was the last book I can remember reading to my three young daughters before taking Prozac. These memories have taken on a newer and more relevant meaning since Gary Greenberg invoked the title of that children's book in his excellent article for the New Yorker, "The Rats of NIMH," following Thomas Insel's blog, "Transforming Diagnosis," in which for a brief moment, the director of the NIMH disavowed psychiatry's bible, the "DSM-5."

After majoring in psychology in college, I entered medical school in 1986 with a strong interest in psychiatry. While in medical school, I was exposed to the subspecialty of child psychiatry, and was very attracted to the idea of making a difference in the lives of vulnerable youth. Child Psychiatrists were experts in understanding normal development through the life cycle. This was particularly fascinating to me and I believed that it would be personally meaningful and fun to work with children. During this time, child psychiatrists often directly provided individual psychotherapy and family therapy to their patients. The use of psychotropic medications in children was not typically a first line treatment.

I was invited to present a work shop with Dan Fisher, MD PhD at the 2012 NAMI-VT annual meeting. These are my comments. They reflect my long term beliefs integrated with my reappraisal of practice in the past year.

Your mental wellness requires a global revolution. In fact, your physical wellness requires one, too. For many years, I have noticed that there are people doing good social change work for mild reform. That is nice, but during my work in what we affectionately call the “mad movement,” I have often called for revolution, because the change we need is so big! We have the technology, a solution is affordable, but we need to act urgently and the main question is, “Do we have the collective will?”

I live a slow paced life. I meditate every morning, refuse to get a smart phone (yet), and it takes me generous amounts of time to do things. This isn't because I am “stupid” or slow to get things. Sometimes I wonder how others get so much done each day - yet the quality and vibration of what I do is unique. It needs time. How does this relate with psychiatric drugs? Psych drugs are rooted in impatience, urgency, emergency.

In "The Order of Things", Michel Foucault, the great French philosopher cites a ‘certain Chinese encyclopedia’ that notes ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’.

After 4 decades as a psychiatric survivor human rights activist and 3 decades with spinal arthritis (ankylosing spondylitis), that fused my spine into peanut brittle, I knew I needed a break. The break that I got about 3 weeks ago was not the one I expected. I slipped off a wet ladder in my writer's studio, and it resulted in a complete break of my neck.

Parental mental illness is associated with increased risk of injuries among offspring, particularly during the first years of the child’s life. Efforts to increase access to parental support for parents with mental illness, and to recognize and treat perinatal metal morbidity in parents in secondary care might prevent child injury.

As we approach world hearing voices day 2013 Karen and I are in Canada. We have just enjoyed running a preconference workshop for about 100 people in Winnipeg. I am sitting in my room before breakfast writing this piece and as I sit I am thinking back twenty-three years ago; I am in a psych unit in Manchester and I have a new support worker called Lindsay. By then I had been a psych patient for almost ten years and was fast approaching spending the rest of my life in the system. My support worker had convinced me to go to a new group that was starting in Manchester called a hearing voices group.

It is possible that if we ask “What happened to you?” instead of “What’s wrong with you?”, we wouldn’t see much of a change at all. Those people who are inclined to think of mental health problems as illnesses, as something “wrong,” would be able to explain that what happened to you was the cause of the illness; it produced what is wrong with you. It is much more crucial to understand “What is happening for you now?”

It may sound a bit cliché, but one of the best definitions of forgiveness I’ve ever heard was actually stated by Oprah Winfrey. Oprah’s definition of forgiveness is, “to accept the fact that the past can’t change.”

A major research group mentions in a paper published in an academically rigorous psychiatric journal (and I get it that some readers consider that an oxymoron) the possible influence of super-sensitivity on increasing the risk of relapse when neuroleptic drugs are stopped. Yet those of us who raise this as a reason to moderate our use of these drugs are considered biased or scientifically naive.

My goal now is to focus on solutions for emotional distress, not talking about medical harm. We all know about the problems with medical harm, but not all people are clear about solutions. I'm not that clear, either, but I'm working on it. I'm not talking about revolution any longer, just trying to make my piece of the pie work.

I ask you to vote against HB1386. I write with a moral obligation to inform you of research findings which were recently defended through the PhD Program in Environmental Psychology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Throughout this research process, I repeatedly gave examples of people who participated who were silenced and retaliated against for expressing their expert perspectives about the public psychiatric service delivery system. Of grave concern is that this silencing extended to people who were reporting abuse of people who were involved with the public psychiatric service delivery system.

After I left my research position on the acute inpatient psychiatric unit of a Boston hospital towards the end of 2006, my life started...

We decided some time ago to hold off on publicizing the Mad in America Continuing Education project until we had a range of presentations. We are just about there. This week we posted the incredible Dr. Eleanor Longden's talk, "The Voices in My Head."  If you have never heard her story, this is one you won't forget.  If you need CMEs or CEUs, or just want to audit this and other amazing presentations for free, please go to the MIACE home page.

Everyone knows how muckraking is supposed to work.  An investigative reporter uncovers hidden wrongdoing; the public is outraged; and the authorities move quickly on...

Although psychiatric researchers have speculated that the rate of people within the (politically-derived, biologically-fictional) racial category of ‘American Indian’ who simultaneously fit into the DSM category of schizophrenia is no greater than the ‘general population,’ we should remember that there’s no word at all for being mentally ill or psychotic or schizophrenic in any traditional language among Native Americans. I feel confident in asserting that’s likely also true for traditional indigenous languages worldwide. This is likely so because visionary, dream-time experiences are not viewed as sickness.

On January 15, 2016, Allen Frances published an article on the Huffington Post titled  Psychiatric Medicines Are Not All Good or All Bad. The article denounces both the "medication fanatics" who prescribe psychiatric drugs when they are not needed, and the "die-hard anti-medication crusaders who try to persuade everyone, including those who really need meds, that they are globally unhelpful and globally harmful." Dr. Frances advocates a middle ground in which people who need psychiatric drugs get them, and people who don't, don't.  On the face of it, this would seem a fairly non-contentious matter, but Dr. Frances's path to this conclusion is fraught with problems which in my view warrant discussion.

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.

When searching for answers related to mental health, at times it can feel as if one is looking for a door in a brick wall. The task can become even more difficult when a family or individual embraces a diagnosis that seems to define one’s identity permanently.