Blogs

The stories we tell ourselves and others have the power to heal or to harm. This is a story about how we define mental health, the challenges we face in pursuit of it, and the power of transforming our stories.

This anecdote is offered as a story in praise of families and a recognition of their importance to the process of recovery.

Judging from the responses of several readers, certainly not all, to my previous post of March 7, “Poverty & Mental Illness: You Can't Have...

In my previous blog, I used a new term, Dialogical Recovery to describe the importance of dialogue to recovery. I and others in the...

If you’ve spent any time in the public mental health system, you know that folks diagnosed or labeled as having serious mental illnesses are...

For outsiders like me who are really critical of mainstream psychiatry, the first thing to understand is that "community psychiatry" is a counterculture within the larger culture of biomedical psychiatry. When I say "counterculture" I don't mean these people had flowers in their hair or face piercings.

This blog entry is another chapter in the story of my personal odyssey as a radical therapist and human rights activist with lived experience of madness that I have been sharing on the Mad in America site. I hope it provides a meaningful look at a piece of our reform movement's history from a ground-level perspective.

This is about neuroleptics. It is about psychosis or madness or whatever term one prefers. It is about people 18 years and older. I take...

In our experience, using anger or name-calling isn’t usually very effective when trying to fight the “establishment” or status quo. Something we teach all...

Let's not keep missing the main point of the SAMHSA stakeholder discussion We have to LISTEN to people that have opposite points of view...

Several months ago, two professors at the University of Pennsylvania were accused of ghostwriting. The university has now announced the results of their investigation, which is partially based on work by the great moral philosopher, George Constanza...

I have had quite a few discussions with people who have not heard of the research on this site. Very often as soon as...

Irving Kirsch (the psychologist who has argued that antidepressants offer a marginal advantage over placebos) has agreement from an unlikely source- advertisements from a pharmaceutical company, which agree completely...

So many treatment colleagues have shared that prior to finding an approach that really works to turn a child’s intensity to greatness, they felt no recourse other that to look for ways to moderate the accelerating poor choices that children they worked with were making. Most relevant here is, that in retrospect, they felt that it boiled down to simply being faithful to their training, which it turns out so often is a set up to fail with difficult children.

I am a board certified psychiatrist and a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. I mention these things only to indicate that I...

If you want solutions for emotional distress, vote NOW! Vote for the distress model and vote for Aunt Bertha. 1) Vote now for the distress...

On one hand the use of prescription drugs in mental health treatment has been compared to insulin for the diabetic. You never hear about...

(Note: Read Bruce Levine's latest post: Anti-Authoritarians and Schizophrenia: Do Rebels Who Defy Treatment Do Better? In my career as a psychologist, I have talked with...

I avoid drug reps but I can not stop them from finding me through the mail. Over the past few months, I have received reprints of an article from The American Journal of Psychiatry (1), reporting on a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study of lurasidone from the company that makes this drug. Since I had it in my hands, I read it. What I found was surprising. Rather than leaving me impressed by lurasidone, it left me wondering what happened with olanzapine (Zyprexa).

During my first few days on the locked psychiatric unit of the hospital on the hill in early December 2008, I counted the passing...

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...

The American Psychiatric Association (APA) has posted a response to the 60 minutes segment on Irving Kirsch and the placebo effect in antidepressant research. But is their response based on scientific data?

Martin Harrow has just published his 20-year outcomes data for schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders. Those who took antipsychotics regularly experienced more psychosis, more anxiety, cognitive impairment, and markedly fewer periods of "sustained recovery." Harrow asks: "Is very long-term treatment with antipsychotic medications undesirable?"

Hi, I'm Corinna West, a psychiatric survivor.  I was very ill one time and now I'm not. That's the short story. The slightly longer...

On February 19, 2012, Lesley Stahl’s “Treating depression: is there a placebo effect?” aired on CBS 60 Minutes. Stahl is to be commended for...