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I wasn't sure how to judge mental health first aid. I kept asking friends taking the course but it's hard to get a good assessment if they don't understand the risks of labels and medication. People need to understand that in order to hear how sometimes things that are intended to help can actually harm.

The suicide of Dan Markingson at the University of Minnesota has brought notoriety to the CAFÉ study and its site investigators, Stephen Olson and Charles Schulz. But the “corrective action” recently issued by the Minnesota Board of Social Work against the CAFÉ study coordinator, Jean Kenney, has raised another disturbing question.

I want to keep urging people to move toward the entrepreneurial approaches, because I think they are very powerful and not well understood or trusted in our community. I have chosen to build a business because I think it's one of the best ways I can impact on our world. After looking at the results of different types of advocacy work, this is the pressure point I've found most likely to make a difference.

In the "agreement for corrective action" against CAFE study coordinator Jean Kenney last week, the Board of Social Work cited Kenney's failure to respond to "alarming voicemail messages" from family members of Dan Markingson. Presumably, the Board is referring to a message left by his mother, Mary Weiss, which warned, "Do we have to wait until he kills himself or someone else before anyone else does anything?" The failure of Kenney and Stephen Olson to take the warnings of Mary Weiss seriously has been one of the most disturbing aspects of this case. In a deposition for the lawsuit filed by Weiss, Kenney was questioned about her response. Here is an excerpt. (The initial questions come from Gale Pearson, an attorney for Mary Weiss.)

As a therapist, I was trained to the gills to believe that investigating the reasons “why” a fellow human being behaves the way he does would enable that person to understand himself, which would promote healing and health. We traditionally believe that knowing the reason for one’s behavior will release him from the root of the problem. It took me years to get out from under this philosophy and practice. Along the way, I met many brilliant therapists who admitted that discovering “why” never yielded them the results they were seeking either.

Out here in Minnesota, where the snow is gently falling, many of us are hunched over our computers, puzzling over a document just posted by the state Board of Social Work. It concerns the death of Dan Markingson (or as the document calls him, “Client #1”). Markingson, of course, was a young man under a commitment order who was coerced into a profitable Seroquel marketing study at the University of Minnesota over the objections of his mother, and whose condition spiraled downward until he committed suicide.

(August, 1985) My first academic article, entitled, “Dissociation and Psychotic Symptoms” is published in The American Journal of Psychiatry. It was a case report of a young girl who experienced visions and voices. We thought that she had dissociative symptoms and we had taught her how to control these experiences through self hypnosis. In the same month, an article was published in another academic journal. This was entitled, “Treatment of Bulimia and Rapid-Cycling Bipolar Disorder with Sodium Valproate: A case Report .” We were describing the same young girl. Our treatments were concurrent. How could this be?

I just got back from the Carter Center Mental Health Symposium on Social Inclusion. I guess this is a prestigious invite, and I was expecting to meet people on the cutting edge of mental health research. I got invited based on my work with the Poetry for Personal Power program where I've helped get together over 1800 young people to talk on stage or listen to each other talking about what they do to get through adversity.

I was never voluntary, no matter how much I convinced myself I was. Only now, my mind, body, and spirit fully free from the mental health system, am I coming to understand this. After desperately searching for answers to that once perplexing question of “Who am I?” I have found that I’m connecting with a true, authentic sense of my Self for the first time.

The phrase "medication tapering" is being used more and more as the preferred term for the psychiatric medication withdrawal or coming off process. Based on my years of work educating many people around coming off medications -- clients, support groups, and in workshops and trainings -- I think that term is misleading, and let me explain why.

She came to us like a breath of fresh air; cheerful, passionate, beautiful, and always looking out for others to her own detriment. We had conversations. "Be a little selfish" I said, "It's OK to look after yourself" - and this was before I knew of the pain in her past.

Evolutionary psychiatry and breakthroughs in neuroscience are rapidly blurring the lines between adaptive and maladaptive changes. What would be possible if we put our attention on, gave money and resources to mental wellness instead of mental illness? The re-election of President Obama provides another opportunity for us to create a future for ourselves and our children that we could be proud to leave as a legacy, especially as it relates to how mental health is defined and considered in the body politic and media. Imagine mental wellness. Together, we can!

Many people today struggle with the intensity of a challenging child and, unfortunately, wind up being advised to use medications as a first intervention rather than as a very last resort. In their heart of hearts, everyone really wants the intensity that has gone awry to be the very source of their child’s greatness.

Little more than a week ago, I participated in a panel discussion that focused on the implications of the DSM-5 for social work practice. It was part of a larger conference co-sponsored by the NYU School of Social Work and the New York City chapter of NASW. So far as I know, it was the first such social work conference that’s taken place in New York specifically assembled to review the new DSM.

How and why the right to fresh air is continuously blocked by money, politics and ignorance. Plus, personal reflections on how nature heals.

Dr. Torrey accuses me of being ignorant and perhaps in this regard he is correct. Where he sees such clarity, I see profoundly difficult questions.

It is more helpful to focus on what clients do well than what they are lacking. These are simple things, but it takes a lot of discipline for professionals to stay focused, stay simple, respect clients as the expert on their life and listen intensely for their strengths and resources.

What if people struggling with madness could explore their emotions in a supportive sanctuary? Do frightening 'psychotic' experiences have the power to transform and heal? Is breakdown also breakthrough? Michael Cornwall became a therapist after surviving his own crisis -- without medication or psychiatric treatment. For more than 30 years he has worked in the tradition of Carl Jung and R.D. Laing to support people to go through psychotic states in medication-free community settings, including John Weir Perry's Diabasis House in the 1970s.

People don't understand that when they reach out for help for themselves or someone they care about, it can have threatening and lifelong consequences. If we ask for help, we risk being given a diagnosis that will stay with us the rest our life, that will limit what we can do, that will limit our relationships and activities, that may cause us to be very poor, to be ostracized and even homeless. We risk being "locked up" for years and years and years.

After reading E. Fuller Torrey’s latest article in the Treatment Advocacy Center newsletter, in which he sharply criticizes Dr. Sandy Steingard for writing about anosognosia on madinamerica.com, and then goes on to attack me for my various writings, I have to confess that this time—after getting over the feeling that my head was going to explode—I thought, my patience with such dishonesty is running out.

Challenging the disease model of addiction should not be viewed as just another interesting scientific and philosophical debate. Calling addiction a “disease” is not only wrong from a scientific perspective, but the promotion of this model of treatment can actually be harmful to some people trying to understand and recover from this life damaging and life threatening problem.

How did the APA talk go? Overall a success-- the audio went viral on the internet, and the talk itself was so crowded we had to move to a larger room -- more than 70 psychiatrists and behavioral healthcare professionals attended. Afterwards many stepped up to shake my hand and congratulate me: I was told by two people I was a gift to the conference, asked to present at a Grand Rounds, encouraged to do a TED talk, thanked for my compassionate response to a question about forced treatment, and invited to do more trainings in the future. I even met several psychiatrists who are Madness Radio listeners. Psychiatry is clearly not a monolithic profession and many in it are beginning to think differently.

Is “recovery” a useful concept or is it overused, co-opted or simply not an accurate way to describe the process of learning to work with and through madness and life’s challenges. Mother Bear Community Action Network explores these arguments and makes a case for recovery.

I believe that one of the underlying reasons it is difficult to move through the obstacles to fully embrace the CRPD (Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities) and fight for our rights, is that discrimination continues to affect us on many levels. We have accommodated in some ways to a system that hurts us - not just the mental health system but the legal system that supports these violent acts and the society that condones them. It can be painful to change, to shift gears, to move in different ways.

Psychiatry’s desperate drive to legitimize itself as a profitable medical authority has resulted in a mass delusion so pervasive and destructive that it's put us on a path towards societal collapse. This is not an overstatement, in my opinion, as the statistics are mind-boggling— one in five Americans are on psychiatric drugs. One in five. By my calculations, this means that 62,913,200 people ingest mind-altering, body-altering, spirit-altering pills they believe to be “medications” on a daily basis.