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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.

In my recent Alternatives keynote I talked about mental health issues and our unjust prisons, including the shameful racism of the criminal justice system...

A Note to the Reader: Thorough searches of my memory reserves have failed to provide me with a complete and detailed account of my...

It was a long haul from being a psychiatric patient in 1992 to graduating with a masters in counseling in 2011. I flunked out...

This past Thursday I attended the American Psychiatric Association's Institute for Psychiatric Services in San Francisco, and then a talk by the Bay Area Mandala Project on "Providing Loving Receptivity Can Help People in Extreme States." I would like to thank both groups for the motivation to publish this — particularly as they would seem to be at odds in the reductionist "dialogue" we so often have — but really aren't so different in my mind for reasons discussed herein: Who is not "in crisis" for questioning their identity and fit within dominant paradigms?

I have recently returned home to Sweden after a great visit in the U.S., where I met some brave, encouraging, bright and warm people. Amongst other things, this has reminded me of my mentor Barbro Sandin, a Swedish psychotherapist who in the early 1980s created a kind of revolution in the psychiatric system when she claimed there is no such thing as “schizophrenia” as an illness. Rather, she said, people are having reactions to a life that is too hard to deal with.

Racially motivated invective and abuse are directed against people purely and simply on the basis of their skin color. Anti-psychiatry invective and abuse, however, are based on the activities of psychiatrists. For the past several decades, psychiatrists have been telling their clients, and the general public, and journalists, that virtually all significant problems of thinking, feeling, and/or behaving are caused by chemical imbalances in the brain. They have stated clearly and unambiguously that these putative imbalances constitute "real illnesses, just like diabetes," and that the imbalances are corrected by psychiatric drugs. So when we mental illness "deniers" point out that the various problems of thinking, feeling, and/or behaving listed in the DSM are not real illnesses, we are actually using the term illness in the same sense as is entailed in psychiatry's scandalously deceptive assertion.

Hey Doc; I was wondering if before you see me the next time and tell my parents that I still need to be medicated for ADHD, you might consider a few things about me that you might not know. You see as a kid who can barely pick out an outfit that matches, make my bed, or wake up not hoping it's Saturday, I kind of have an active imagination. Like nearly all of my friends, I hate taking baths and I like to daydream. And when I daydream, I seem to not pay attention to what others are talking about. I kind of get lost in my own little world where rainbows do lead to pots of gold, leprechauns are real, life often feels like my favorite video game, and fart jokes never get old.

Given my experience as a state level administrator several years ago, I have continued an interest in the way which public expenditures for mental health reflect a variety of interests — usually in an attempt to limit expenditures from the state coffers. One of the areas of greatest concern to state legislators each session is the cost of participating in the Medicaid program. A significant portion of state mental health budgets, especially for community mental health programs, is in this pot of money. And psychiatric drugs are a major expense in state Medicaid program. As I will point out, however, there are major advocacy groups who want to expand, not limit access to these drugs.

Expect Recovery….seems like a tall order, especially for people that have: little hope; spent years cycling in and out of hospitals; spent years on...

It's too bad, of course, that our state and federal regulators can't seem to muster the political will to require the marketing and prescribing of safer opiate painkillers. Indeed, the federal Department of Health and Human Services could ensure that Medicare and Medicaid include agonist-antagonist drugs in their drug formularies and save many lives in one bold sweep. But until the feds get their act together -- are you listening, President Obama? -- it's up to the families who have lost loves ones to prescription drug overdoses to sue the drug makers and force change.

When I pick up a pen, I put down my fear. Sorry, they don't both fit into my hand at once. Meditation teachers often say the hardest part is getting to the cushion. The hardest part of writing is probably picking up the pen. So, pick up a pen, I dare you. Write even if you think no one will read it, even if you don't want anyone to read it.

It is close to midnight and a group of eight high-level CFOs from the major pharmaceutical companies sit anxiously around a conference table. They all have binders with TransCelerate BioPharma written boldly in black across the cover. TransCelerate is a consortium born in 2012, whose mission is to accelerate the development of new drugs and bring them quickly to market. There are two reasons for the high level of anxiety that the CFOs in the above meeting are feeling; first, the research and development of new drugs has been slower than predicted and profits not as massive as hoped for. The second reason is alarming; NIMH may soon start cutting research funding and the pharmaceutical companies have depended upon their liaison with NIMH for funds and for political leverage.

The FDA's black box warnings on antidepressants, which incidentally were long overdue, had a negative impact on pharma-psychiatry's image, and on their business, but had no negative impact on client welfare. Nevertheless, psychiatry continues to resist the reality that their sacred drugs do in fact cause harm, and that the FDA warnings were needed. For psychiatry, business and professional status routinely trump client welfare.

The use of seclusion and restraint in mental health care in Ohio is legitimately subject to the assessment, criticisms and recommendations of the United Nations Special Rapporteur of the Human Rights Council on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

Beginning in the 1990s, a number of pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies began to set up bioethics advisory boards, ostensibly to obtain guidance about controversial ethical issues. Over the years, the ties between industry and bioethics have gradually grown closer, with companies setting up endowed chairs and hiring bioethics consultants. Yet very little is known about how bioethics advisory boards work. What exactly is their purpose? Do they prevent ethical wrongdoing, or do they provide ethical cover?

The recent July 9th Ct. Mirror article, Children Stuck in Crisis, accomplishes the intended purpose of deceptively convincing the people of Connecticut that there’s a severe mental health services crisis in the state. On the surface, the article’s author provides a compelling scenario of the state’s youth failing to get the needed mental health care and forced to rely on emergency room services. The problem with the presentation is the failure to address a key piece of information in the reported mental-health-crisis-puzzle – the increased psychiatric drugging of Connecticut’s children.

As we struggle to invent a humane approach to the extreme states that get called “psychosis” or “madness” or “schizophrenia,” it may be helpful to investigate some of the better approaches developed in the past. While these approaches are not without their flaws, they are often surprisingly insightful. (It can also of course be depressing to notice how truths once more widely known were so easily “forgotten” as compassionate approaches got ditched in favor of the latest coercive innovations.)

What began as a story of self-discovery, spiritual awakening, and healing written only for family and friends evolved into a memoir reflecting my path towards liberation that other people might find useful on their journey of awakening to the person they were born to be. A power greater than myself became a wind under my wings moving the creation of this memoir forward. The story was enhanced by the process of creative expression that deepened the intimate look at my experience of loss and grieving that were intertwined with my liberation journey.

I woke up at 3 am this morning. The spring is a time of big energy for me. Once upon a time in my life this energy was pathologized and called manic, bipolar. I was taught to fear it and drug it and by no means express it. I have been unlearning all that for some years now.

In the west the almighty “professional” is the guru. The educated “expert,” in general, takes on many different guises but we are systematically taught not to trust ourselves and to, instead, submit to the expert opinions of people who do not know us and who, all too often, believe they know far more than they actually do. The party line in mental health care is that we should find a professional for just about everything. What happens if an appropriate professional is not available? The reality on the ground is that is often the case as much as we’d like to think otherwise.

The Bay Area survivor and peer movement came out strong recently, pushing the Alameda Board of Supervisors to table a proposed expansion of forced outpatient commitment. AB 1421, more commonly known as Laura's Law, says that if a court or judge decides that a person with mental health issues requires treatment, they must abide by a plan determined by a team of professionals on an outpatient basis. The law was passed in California in 2002 but is conditional on California county approval for implementation. Fueled by sensational accounts of the death of Laura Wilcox, who was killed by a man with a psychiatric diagnosis, AB 1421 holds the false promise that force and coercion are the solution to help people in emotional distress.

In May 2014, the RIAT team asked GSK what the children who became suicidal in the course of Study 329 have since been told. The consent form says that anyone entering the study would be treated just the way they would be in normal clinical practice. In Study 329, the children taking imipramine were by design force titrated upwards to doses of the order of 300 mg, which is close to double the dose of imipramine given in adult trials by GSK or in normal clinical practice. In normal clinical practice it would be usual to inform somebody who had become suicidal on an SSRI that the treatment had caused their problem.

Through the ISPS listserve, I read a blog this morning written by Thomas Insel, director of the NIMH. The way he described people I daily meet in work and in my own life created a rising pulse, so I decided to find out some more about his thoughts and practice. I am not saying that what I read on his blog is unknown to me, but still it made me wonder how on earth is it possible to invest so much money - and resources - in research which is so distant from practice, and so far away from humanistic and holistic ideas and theories.

For too long we have considered mental well-being to be about the five, ten, fifteen, or twenty percent of us that gets a psychiatric label each year. But really, if you look around at out world for a moment, you can easily see that to be alive, to be human, to exist, one must have support and healing. Festivals like this one give a glimpse of what the world can be like and I recommend this experience for envisioning a future mental health system or any futuristic vision of change.