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While Sylvia Plath and Ernest Hemingway received extensive medical treatment for depression but tragically committed suicide, other famously depressed people—including Abraham Lincoln, William James, Georgia O’Keeffe, Sigmund Freud, William Tecumseh Sherman, Franz Kafka, and the Buddha—have taken different paths. Did those luminaries who took alternative paths and recovered really have the symptoms of major depression, and did their antidotes really work?

I love counseling, and helping people deal with their emotional and relational problems. But in addition, I encourage anyone suffering from mental issues to consider that nutritional issues are also involved in their distress.

It is time to seriously consider re-focusing our energy and resources away from placing peer staff in roles where they support the mental health system’s status quo, and toward the goal of making high-quality peer advocacy available to people faced with coercion by the mental health system.

In the political struggle between First-Order Psychiatry and the Rehumanizing Resistance, the Resistance continues to win scientific victories (including the First-Order’s retreat from its “chemical imbalance theory of mental illness”); however, the Resistance is losing the larger struggle against the First-Order’s expansion of influence. Winning scientific battles but losing the war will continue until the Resistance: (1) fully recognizes the political nature of this struggle; (2) accepts the reality that it has an adversary aimed at its destruction; and (3) creates and implements effective political strategies and tactics.

This is a study of psychiatry. It is a study of an area officially a branch of medicine and overwhelmingly seen as legitimate, benign, progressive, and effective. But what if society had it wrong? What if this were not legitimate medicine? Dare we imagine a world where helping is not professionalized, where caring is not commodified. Where, in the spirit of community, we go about the business of life together?

In my last post, I argued that the single most damaging effect of psychiatric diagnosis is loss of meaning. By ruthlessly divesting experiences of their personal, social and cultural significance, diagnosis turns ‘people with problems’ into ‘patients with illnesses.’ Horrifying stories of trauma, abuse, discrimination and deprivation are sealed off behind a pseudo-medical label as the individual is launched on what is often a lifelong journey of disability, exclusion and despair.

I think it is indeed true that many people go to psychiatrists specifically to get drugs. This is because it is widely known that psychiatrists will prescribe psychiatric drugs readily. In fact, since about 1980 or so, they really don't do much of anything else. For most psychiatrists, a "patient" returning at regular intervals for "med-checks" and refills is the ideal scenario. Within the psychiatric community, there is, I think, a great deal more concern expressed about non-compliant "patients" than there is about those who adhere faithfully to the prescription and keep coming back for more.

This is the second of a series of excerpts from Cracked Open, a book whose unintentional beginning came after I became physically dependent on Ativan in 2010. After a year of following my doctor’s orders for daily use to treat insomnia, my body and mind began to fall apart. I’m serializing the book here – before sending it out into the world – because MIA became a lighthouse for me. I want this community’s feedback because I want to help make a difference. I want my words and message to be clear and strong.

Dear Bob-- I want to share a case from this past week the reveals a disturbing misuse of stimulants in treating a poorly diagnosed case...

It is important to illuminate the authoritarian nature of mental health professionals—especially those who have not rebelled in any way against their professional socialization. Here I will summarize an analysis from the Journal of Medical Ethics on the variables in “contemporary medical culture” that produce doctors who are authoritarian and harmful.

Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr said that “of all the forms of inequality, injustice in healthcare is the most shocking and inhumane.” For those of us diagnosed with mental illnesses and our families and loved ones, we know all to well the effects of these inequalities from personal and first hand experiences. For those of us like me, we also know of the extreme health and mental health disparities that exist within our communities of color.

I was in a form of reparative therapy in British Columbia, Canada, for six years, after which I filed a medical malpractice suit against my former psychiatrist, “Dr. Alfonzo,” for treating my homosexuality as a disease. If these new laws are to be criticized, it is that the use of “change” therapies on people older than 18 should be prohibited as well. I was 24 when I met Dr. Alfonzo, 31 when I left his therapy, and almost 40 when the lawsuit ended in an out-of-court settlement in 2002. Nearly twenty years after leaving the therapy, I am still affected by the consequences of those six years of “treatment.”

We should explore a raft of interventions, as susceptibility to psychosis isn’t separable from a person’s general well-being.

I was invited to present a work shop with Dan Fisher, MD PhD at the 2012 NAMI-VT annual meeting. These are my comments. They reflect my long term beliefs integrated with my reappraisal of practice in the past year.

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.

If your government espouses freedom for all but abuses citizens of its own as well other countries, its pronouncements are pure propaganda. This article seeks to help readers make the connection between the public and secret behaviors of the U.S. government as it continues to oppress those individuals within its reach that occupy a politically marginalized status; including, of course, persons who are survivors and/or users of psychiatric services.

The current view of mental illness and its accessory idea, mental health, were born of the Enlightenment. Formerly, spiritual ailments had been considered sins or heresies. They were allegedly produced by the diabolical interventions of witches, Satan, and/or Jews, and confessors relied on prayer or holy water to remedy the soul. With the decline of Christianity in Europe, those ailments were reinterpreted in secular (mechanistic, atomistic, materialist) terms that reduced the self to its molecular substructure. The mind became equated with the brain, and remedies naturally became mechanical or chemical—insulin shock, lobotomy, electroshock, surgery, and drugs.

The medications are there to disconnect us from our divine, creative Self, but the human being is remarkable and incredibly resilient.

The experience of hearing voices during madness, or during our "normal" and constant inner conversation that never stops, shows that we use words to...

How to square the violent restraint and isolation of a vulnerable patient with the empowering, pacifist values of the hospital's founders?

Over the past few weeks I have been witness to, and increasingly involved in trying to stop one of the most extreme examples of psychiatric brutality I have encountered in my 40 years in this field. And I have encountered quite a few. I suggest you sit down before watching and reading. This is not your usual, run-of-the-mill psychiatric abuse story.

As I considered the voice I heard talking to me in my own head, it occurred to me that what was happening was, more or less, a later development of the brain talking to a more basic and earlier level of consciousness, one which was not verbal itself and was, in fact, the actual seat and locus of my real awareness.

Most people who enter the mental health field do so with good intentions. But when it comes to opening up to ideas or information that challenge your worldview or how you conduct your business, on the whole, you’re doing a pretty poor job.

I sat in my office in the middle of Provo, Utah (home of BYU) on a scorching hot Wasatch mountain day. I was taking a brief professional hiatus...

Technology is worshipped in U.S. culture, but when it comes to transforming depression and emotional suffering, is this predilection for technology justified? Technology worship means...