Blogs

Essays by a diverse group of writers, in the United States and abroad, engaged in rethinking psychiatry. (The directory of personal stories can be found here, and initiatives here).

Markingson Case Supporters: Please Join Our Call-In Campaign

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Patient advocates and bioethicists have launched a call-in campaign demanding action on psychiatric research abuse at the University of Minnesota.

Insane Medicine, Chapter 8: Treatment Traps and How to Get Out of Them (Part...

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Deconstructing diagnosis, the nature of psychological injury, and how identifying a problem can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Why I Have (Mostly) Given Up on Diagnosis

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Every year about this time I review my template file for new client notes. It has blank sections for name, presenting concern, history, plan, and a number of other categories. This year I found myself staring at it, considering whether a revision was in order. And the category that leapt out at me was “Diagnosis.” The truth is, I seldom use it any more.
rebel minds

Capitalism Makes Solutions Impossible: A Review of ‘Rebel Minds’

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Psychiatry’s role, Rebel Minds makes clear, is to prepare the population for capitalism’s purposes, and to cull the humans who it fails to prepare. The relationship is symbiotic: psychiatry trades in medicalizing and biologicizing human suffering, which capitalism produces an endless supply of; it’s a match made in heaven.

Middle School Invasion: When the Pharmaceutical Companies Come to Town

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On January 7, 2016 my newly 13-year-old son (he helped me fashion the title for this blog!) brought home two permission slips from the middle school where he is currently (hopefully) making his way through the 7th grade. One of the slips was for a class trip to the Bronx Zoo. Okay, fine. However, the other asked me to give my okay for him to participate in a “Signs of Suicide” (SOS) curriculum and the perhaps-too-honestly-named ‘Brief Screening for Adolescent Depression’ (BSAD) that accompanies it. (Does no one else see the perverse humor in a depression screener that seems to actually be encouraging those screened to “be sad”?)
sigmund freud

Freud: The First Anti-Psychiatrist

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Freud showed disdain for psychiatrists — he saw their untruthfulness and harmfulness. An antidote for the medical model’s infestation of our culture would be to reintroduce some of Freud’s theories to the public. After all, wouldn’t the medical model’s opposite be the best means of counteracting it?

Pinball Wizards and the Doomed Project of Psychiatric Diagnosis

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The DSM claims to be a scientific system of classification. The validity of any system of scientific classification is the extent to which it can be shown to reflect the real world. Fifty years of study and investigation, and huge sums of money spent across the Western world on neuroscientific research institutes, on careers and equipment, has failed to establish the validity of a single psychiatric diagnosis.
sign reads "stop doing what doesn't work"

Stop Saying This, Part Two: “Reframing” and More

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Myths around reframing, having to love yourself before someone else can love you, and being triggered are all addressed in this blog.

December 6, 2010

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Bob- I saw a sixteen-year old girl for a sports physical today. She plays softball for the local high school and also is on the...

From Burning Man to Bellevue Hospital

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Every year around this time my thoughts turn to my friends participating in Burning Man. Burning Man is founded on these 10 principles. Stories I have heard over the years have often made me wonder when and how society condones public displays of madness. Stories from burners have often reminded me of some of my own emotional crises, and I wonder about expeditioning to places where what would be called madness by a psychiatrist may be completely normal, acceptable, and encouraged.

The Children Lead

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How is it that we allow the agendas of others to occupy our childrens’ minds? Is it possible that a stranger can know our child better than we do? Is there anything a baby needs to learn that can’t be taught by being held in a parent’s arms? Because my children’s eyes and ears and thoughts are on me every day, they are key players in my ongoing efforts to live a right life. I count on their eyes and ears and thoughts to shore me up during times of temptation. They always lead me home.

Remembering A Medication-Free Madness Sanctuary

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In my last blog entry, I described how the I-Ward first episode madness sanctuary came into being and how I ended up working there as a therapist for over three years. As you read now about my time there, I would again like to ask you to keep in mind the question I posed in my first two blog entries- "If Madness isn't what Psychiatry says it is, then what is it?"

Thinking about Alternatives to Psychiatric Diagnosis

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I want to follow up my first post by outlining the principles of possible alternatives to psychiatric diagnosis – that is, alternatives in addition to the most obvious one, which is simply to stop diagnosing people.
psych drug withdrawal takes a village

“How Did This Happen?” – Being Injured By Pharmaceuticals Once Again

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How did it happen to me? It happened because none of us have enough resources for the sort of brain injury and impairment the psychopharmaceutical drugs impart upon us. No one knows what is really being done to our brains and some of us are clearly more sensitive than others.
three identical strangers

“Three Identical Strangers” and the Nature-Nurture Debate

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Three Identical Strangers is a riveting film describing the story of identical triplets separated at six months of age and reunited in early adulthood. Their story provides no evidence in support of the genetic side of the nature-nurture debate, but it does supply some evidence in favor of the environment.

Insane Medicine, Chapter 7: Industrialised Psychotherapy Markets Western Folk Psychology (Part 1)

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Sami Timimi explores the common factors that influence therapy’s success, the evidence base for psychotherapy, and the over-promotion of CBT.

Chapter Three: At War With A Diagnosis

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Note: In this third entry, it is still early on in my story. It is the fall of my ninth grade year, I am...

On the Link Between Psychiatric Drugs and Violence

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One of psychiatry's most obvious vulnerabilities is the fact that various so-called antidepressant drugs induce homicidal and suicidal feelings and actions in some people, especially late adolescents and young adults. This fact is not in dispute, but psychiatry routinely downplays the risk, and insists that the benefits of these drugs outweigh any risks of actual violence that might exist.

7 Tips to Help a Distracted Child

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Simple changes such as keeping a calm home environment, limiting media distractions and enrolling your child in sports will help a child who is inattentive or having problems focusing on his or her school work. They are also useful for any child and can even prevent inattentiveness in an ever-more-distracting world.
light

When Minds Crack, The Light Might Get In: A Spiritual Perspective on Madness

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You can’t go back to mundane ways of seeing the world after very dark things happen. Trauma cracks open a hole in our lives and in our minds, throwing us into the zone where we face the big spiritual questions. Bad ideas can get in when things open up like that. But it’s also possible that something new and positive can get in.

“They Need to be Held Accountable”

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Psychiatrists at the University of Minnesota forced a young man into a profitable study of antipsychotic drugs over the objections of his mother, who desperately warned that his condition was deteriorating and that he was in danger of killing himself. On May 8, 2004, Mary Weiss' only son, Dan Markingson, committed suicide. A petition to the governor of Minnesota now asks for an investigation.
Close up photo of hands being held

Peer Respite: Why It Should be Everyone’s Concern

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My intent with this blog is to compare some lessons learned from my recent medical crisis response to a similar peer-run respite response.

Catherine’s Story: A Child Lost to Psychiatry 

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A year ago today, our youngest child died, thanks to the adversarial actions and toxic treatments foisted on her by medical-model psychiatry. By telling her story, we hope to promote systemic change.

Psychiatric Survivor Entrepreneurs

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Many psychiatric survivors have created a gift economy of sorts in offering peer support, and this is by no means to criticize those offering their best guidance freely to those who desperately need it. In fact, the gift economy saved my life when it was threatened by psychiatric drugs. Yet, my entrepreneurial spirit, as chaotic and unsophisticated as it has been at times, has played a huge role in saving me from being a chronic mental patient with a chronic identity of “sick” or “failure” or “other”.

Dear Boston Globe, Part II: You Forgot the Facts

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Dear Boston Globe: So many terrible things have happened in the last 48-hours or so. On Tuesday, July 5, Alton Sterling was brutally executed by police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. On Wednesday, July 6, another black man, Philando Castile also lost his life at the hands of the police in Minnesota as he sat in his car and reached for his wallet. That same day, the Murphy Bill passed the House, and you released your second 'Spotlight on Mental Health Care' Globe article, this time called  ‘The Desperate and the Dead: Police Confrontations.