Blogs

During the past six months, I have traveled to a number of English speaking countries to speak about my book Anatomy of an Epidemic,...

In the last year of high school, my daughter’s personality suddenly changed, almost overnight it seemed. Initially, I chalked it up to adolescence. What had...

“What do you think caused your problems?,” I asked. “I have a chemical imbalance, a chemical imbalance, an imbalance in the brain that makes me ill.”

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’.

Family therapists view violent young people in the context of the wider social systems of which they are a part. This typically means the youth’s parents, but it can also include grandparents, teachers, or even friends. Framing youth violence in terms of the social context or family system--rather than as a psychological problem of the individual-- is the most effective way of putting an end to the violent behavior.

Mental health services today are almost completely dominated by the view that extreme distress such as psychoses are biological disorders that require treatment with drugs or other medical interventions. This is despite the absence of evidence that such conditions have a biological basis. In addition to this, recent work within the evidence-based medicine paradigm casts doubt on the effectiveness of most forms of physical treatment in psychiatry. At the same time the evidence accumulates that many physical treatments, such as the long-term use of neuroleptic drugs, are fraught with risks and danger.

The studies that the FDA relied upon for adults over age 24 were dismally flawed and untrustworthy compared to the ones used for children. The child studies showed that antidepressants can cause suicidality — the adult studies showed nothing other than FDA collusion with drug companies.

When constructing the ADHD diagnosis, progenitors essentially say, "Let's study a group of people who do particular hyperactive, impulsive, and distracted behaviors that are associated with chronic and pervasive problems in school, social life, and work. If the person is an adult, the problems must be present in childhood and show consistency throughout development. We will call this group "ADHD" and study correlated biological characteristics and other associated difficulties. We will continue to tweak the criteria so that the diagnostic net falls on the people with the correlated dysfunctions and patterns of biology that we find in our research.

Mad in America readers will not be astonished by the news that Big PhRMA showers physicians with “free” trinkets and samples and lunches and dinners and junkets and dollars. Such tactics are common throughout the world of commerce, where they are described by terms ranging from “promotion” to “commercial bribery.” But do bribe-like actions ensnare physicians?

In the midst of flagrant professional misrepresentation of ECT, this is a call to arms. Quite simply, the time has come for a frontal assault on the ECT industry and on the professionals associated with it. The time has come to rid society of this barbaric “treatment” altogether.

Allow me to introduce myself to you... I'm a California transplant and now live and work in the Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex where I...

I had the best of intentions of sitting down Friday morning (12/14) to write about how faith — belief in myself, intrinsic healing, and the basic goodness of the universe — helped me through withdrawal from psychoactive medications. Then, the woman who was going to watch our son couldn’t make it due to car trouble, so I decided to take the little man out in his stroller. Before I left, I checked email and saw a brief flicker on Yahoo about a “school shooting in Connecticut.”

Human beings can be helped in all sorts of ways: with better schools, cleaner water, less tyranny, more peace, and fairer institutions. Movements of the last hundred years have given names to these different aspirations for betterment: the women’s movement, the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, clean air and clean water initiatives, and so on. Now another sort of “helping” is desperately needed.

For weeks I had been trying to get released from the psychiatric ward, and none of my arguments, compliance, or attempted air of normality had made an impression on the barely-visible ward psychiatrist. I had, I was told, made a very serious suicide attempt and this was a predictor of future attempts. They would let me know when they thought I was sufficiently remorseful and stabilized to be released.

The faults of modern psychiatry are numerous and profound, and many readers here know firsthand about its destructive force. But are these faults so vast that there is nothing worth saving?

Now in the current issue of Skeptic, I have an article called “Depression Treatment: What Works and How We Know” (article rights owned by...

I am committed. Fully committed to creating a solution. Are you with me? I think medications and labels for people experiencing emotional distress should be almost entirely eliminated, and should not be applied first, for everyone and forever, to people experiencing extreme states. Our current mental health system is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. We need mental health exit ramps, we need human ways to help each other in crisis and through adversity, we need compassion and love and friendship in times of struggle. We need each other.

Peter Gøtzsche discusses how textbooks portray brain imaging data for psychiatric diagnoses and the flaws with that body of research.

This is a summary compiled by people in the mental health civil rights movement. Some of us call ourselves psychiatric survivors; those who have survived psychiatric treatment, not the “illness.” Many of us have found scientific evidence and our own personal experiences showing that emotional distress is not an illness. We have found recovery using a variety of approaches and methods, but here are several concepts of hope and empowerment repeated in many of our personal stories.

Just this morning CNN reported that 3 men were arrested over plans to travel from N.Y. to join ISIS and one of them posted online about his plans to assassinate the President. Cyberspace and social media are the platforms from which terrorists speak, express their ideas and exert powerful influences over some individuals in this and other countries. The voices of terrorists are clearly compelling and appealing. Their voices are being responded to in dangerous ways.

A final response to the Boston Globe's Spotlight on Mental Health series, including a review of their last three installments in addition to their most recent, the dubiously titled “Solutions.”

SAMHSA should be commended for undertaking an important educational task with laudable goals. Unfortunately, I have to conclude that SAMHSA’s Recovery to Practice module on medications for psychiatrists is a very minimal and even misleading attempt at educating psychiatrists.

Bob-- Today, I saw a healthy, strapping young man, 28 years old and an avid recreational softball player. He is a former college athlete and...

Secret court proceedings against someone certainly justifies the feeling that people are out to get them. Expressing this sentiment is characterized as paranoia. If people felt they had a fair legal process they are likely to be less upset.

A career update for members of the “Psychiatry Hall of Shame,” including the group excoriated in the 2008 Congressional investigations, and another psychiatrist who conducted studies aimed at inducing psychosis—experiments that appeared to run counter to the Nuremberg Code of research ethics.