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I was recently asked to give the commencement address for Goddard College's masters program in psychology and counseling. This is what I said.

I've just returned from a meeting of 17 activists self-identified as users or survivors of psychiatry, or people with psychosocial disabilities, from all over the world. Literally all over the world. An international gathering of human rights defenders that makes me proud to be among them. It was a meeting where I felt heard and acknowledged and able to fully give what I had to give - to offer it up along with everyone else's contributions for the common deliberation. I gave all and received all in return.

On March 18th, Ronald Pies, a psychiatrist based in Lexington, Massachusetts, wrote a letter to the New York Times. He argued in favor of the usefulness and harmlessness (when well used) of psychiatric diagnosis and wondered as to the misgivings so many seem to have. The Times invited its readership to participate in a dialogue by submitting responses to Pies’s piece. Laura Delano, Paula Caplan and I were among the relative few who managed to get our voices heard. Pies had the last word, though: He gave just two short sentences to my dispatchment, and summarily disregarded so many years of pain and loss and abuse of power.

Service users and survivors who work in a behavioral health settings are faced with important questions about whether or not to share their lived experience and when. We may ask ourselves: Am I ready? What about the risks and politics of disclosure? How do I address an associated expectation or barrier, or deal with the possibility of discrimination? What kind of support is available to me in the process? I’m pleased to announce Sharing Experience Lived Firsthand (SELF).

Sandra Steingard writes in Community Psychiatrist about Lex Wunderink's study, published in the August JAMA Psychiatry, which found that people who discontinued medication have...

Arguably the most controversial drug study ever, Study 329, concluded that paroxetine was a safe and effective medication for treating major depression in adolescents. It concluded that paroxetine was a safe and effective medication for treating major depression in adolescents, and it is still widely cited in the medical literature. Though GlaxoSmithKline’s promotion based on Study 329 resulted in the biggest fine in corporate history, the study remains unretracted.

"I want to change the way we think about mental health care so that any child, whether they have a mental illness or simply need support through a difficult time, can get the right help at the right time." This was said by Care Minister Norman Lamb and quoted by the BBC on March 17th 2015. Mr. Lamb is known to have a son who has suffered mental health difficulties and it may well have come from the heart as much as it did from the election fever which is beginning to infect British politicians. However it says something worth picking up upon. I want to change the way we think about mental health care… and … simply need support through a difficult time. These are important shifts of language, and doubly important when they come from a government health minister.

By January of my junior year in college, I had reached my first true emotional bottom. Though surrounded by people on a daily basis...

In these days of sequestrations, budget cliffs, and congressional gridlock, everyone is feeling pressured to cut back, cut corners and find the most inexpensive way to accomplish anything and everything. For those of us who have been working so hard over the past decades, this leads to the obvious question, "can we afford recovery?" I mean, after all, it is usually cheaper to just give someone a drug than to invest in the time and effort needed to bring human spirits back alive to strive and thrive. So I decided to look at this question, from the vantage point of my own singular life.

Two weeks ago there was an editorial in the Wall Street Journal that basically eviscerated the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Agency (SAMHSA) while at the same time calling for support of HR 3717 – The Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act. HR 3717 has elements that we agree with as well as elements we don’t. In addition, there are elements that are just plain confusing to us. In this post I want to address three of the most popular sound bites (two of which found their way into the WSJ editorial) that continue to come up again and again.

Yesterday, Dr. Daniel Fisher emailed and asked my thoughts with regard to “recovery”. Even before I walked away from prescription-pad-only psychiatric work, others asked me about this. Other treatment providers, designated patients and family members asked what I thought they could expect to happen next and what they should do to make things better. I told them that chemical interventions are not the only, or even the essential, tool for recovery.

The Western Mass Recovery Learning Community (along with the five other RLCs across the state of Massachusetts) remains in jeopardy of a 50% slash to our budget that would go into effect July 1, 2015 should it come to pass. As noted in my previous post (Peer Supports Under Siege), the proposed reduction was introduced by Governor Charlie Baker in early March. However, there are many hoops to jump through and so we’ll remain in budget limbo for some time to come while the House and Senate draw up their own recommendations and then everyone comes together to make a final call.

Saying we do not like the medical model will not make that model go away. I do not think we resolve these problems simply by declaring that emotional distress is not a medical concern.

Yesterday, I have to confess, I experienced one of the more satisfying days of my journalistic career. Every journalist hopes that his or her...

Where is the evidence base to support the assertion that the millions of people in our “civilised society,” that are defined as having a mental illness, are in fact ill at all? We know that the chemical imbalance theory has been disproven, we know that the geneticists have found nothing to validate a theory that people are vulnerable to inherent defects and that psychiatry remains the only stream of medicine that relies on the subjective assessment of a human being. What we also know is that there are severe consequences for many of those people as a result of these—at best—hypothetical assumptions about the causes of emotional distress.

Our "friends" at NAMI Ohio took the occasion of so-called "Mental Illness Awareness Week" to try and drum up support for their efforts to loosen criteria for involuntary outpatient commitment (IOC) laws in Ohio. I would encourage those interested, particularly those in Ohio, to contact Ohio legislators as NAMI suggests; but to encourage them to vote DOWN any changes to the current law. Remind them that anosognosia is deliberately being mis-applied...

Marcia Angell’s two-part essay in the New York Review of Books, which appeared in the June and July issues, has helped trigger a much-needed...

I am sitting at the annual meeting for the Society for Research in Nicotine and Tobacco in Houston, Texas because I am presenting some...

On August 11, Pediatrics, the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, published an article that was based on data derived from a random selection of families concerning their health problems or concerns. Surprisingly, the incidence of disability due to physical conditions declined by 11.8%, while disability due to mental/neurodevelopmental conditions increased by 20.9%. The highest increases were among children under the age of 6, and children from more advantaged homes. At least part of the reason for this stems from the fact that while the prevalence of physical disability is limited by the prevalence of the particular pathology in question, no such limitation applies to "psychiatric disabilities."

I have had to think a lot about how to navigate supportive relationships and how to figure out how to not let people’s needs for support consume my life entirely, while still trying to be supportive in ways that I can. Sometimes it works out better than others.

Good Pharma is the story of the Mario Negri Institute. Mario Negri was a wealthy patron who on his death in 1960 bequeathed a large sum of money to support independent pharmaceutical research to an upcoming researcher Silvio Garattini. Garattini and Alfredo Leonardi set about building an Institute centred on the new drugs and new techniques. They continue to grow without ever having patented any of their many discoveries or concealing any of the data from experiments that didn’t work out or accommodating any of their trials to industry’s wishes.

On May 18, I had the pleasure and privilege of chairing a workshop at the American Psychiatric Association's annual meeting in Toronto. The topic: Rethinking the Long-Term Use of Antipsychotics in Schizophrenia: For Everyone, No one or Some?

We spend a lot of time in this community complaining about our lack of voice and power. We blame the news outlets and their coverage; so blind that it ignores our stories, and research that’s been readily accessible for years. We blame people like Representative Tim Murphy and his fear-fueled political agenda. We blame ‘Big Pharma.’ We blame ‘the system.’ We blame anybody but ourselves.

Public perception of mental health stigma does not entirely reflect a reality that exists. Many of you reading this that have experienced truly negative reactions from others (due to mental health concerns and/or treatment) may be angered or offended by this proposition. However, no one (especially myself) is saying that stigma is not a serious concern that doesn’t need to be addressed. It is. Although in some ways I do feel that people can seek out treatment with less apprehension today than decades ago, there is no doubt that many still experience negative reactions (intentionally or unintentionally) from what others perceive in them.

As a journalist, I long have been fascinated by reporting on the storytelling forces within American medicine that create societal understanding of the merits...