Blogs

When women receive less pay than men for the same work, they were about two and a half times more likely to "have major depressive disorder," and about four times more likely to "have generalized anxiety disorder" than their male counterparts.  But when women were earning more than men, the odds were 1.2 and 1.5 respectively. The use of psychiatric terminology ("major depressive disorder" and "generalized anxiety disorder") constitutes something of a barrier to communication here, but the general message is clear: people (in this case women) who are routinely treated unfairly and discriminately are more likely to be depressed and anxious, than those not so treated.

Heather Armstrong’s life was taken by psychiatry, and our unwillingness to scrutinize their methods of madness.

Understanding life events (and/or our responses to them) as trauma has transformed how we suffer and how we relate to pain.

Matthew Aldridge, a psychiatric nurse at London's Lambeth Hospital, just published a new article in the 2011 Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing, "Addressing Non-Adherence to Antipsychotic Medication: A Harm-Reduction Approach." This is an extraordinarily well researched clinical discussion of professional medication practice.

Bob-- Here is a letter that I wrote several months ago in response to an early reader of my blog here. She expressed concern about...

Why is this scholarship important? Because it will fund, create recognition for, and promote research into violence against Indigenous women. It includes not only what is conventionally seen as violence such as murder, rape, and battery, but also violence perpetrated by institutions, including psychiatry.

Skepticism, especially from those with lived experience, is necessary. It forces us to question whether our tools and methods truly help.

In the May 2018 issue of Current Psychiatry, renowned psychiatrist and editor in chief Dr. Henry Nasrallah provides a list of 27 "principles of psychiatric practice," most of them self-serving platitudes. There's one principle he has omitted, if we are to consider his own career to be exemplary: Cultivate mutually beneficial relationships with pharmaceutical companies.

Check out the story that appeared on August 30 on CNN.com titled “Growing Up Bipolar,”  and the one  on August 31 in the New...

This means that what ADHD proponents present as validation of a diagnosis of a real and treatable disorder is in fact a placebo effect caused by an ostensibly scientific label, which exists in synergy with an efficient, legal drug. The ADHD label produces this placebo effect because its diagnosis is based on behavior that in reality could be observed by anyone. What is observed sounds "scientific"; it is easily understandable and highly obvious. When the diagnosis is turned into an action plan, we forget that there is nothing scientific about it and that its evaluation is purely subjective and clinical; that it creates a great many false positives, and that a drug prescribed in half of the cases indeed does have serious side effects.

Bob-- I had an interesting case today. A friendly, 24 year old, very slender and slightly distracted Vietnamese woman who has a 18 month-old...

Malcharist, by Paul John Scott, is a fictional account of one of psychiatry’s most influential key opinion leaders (KOLs), his ghostwriter, and a journalist on the trail of a big scandal in the world of Big Pharma.

Peter Gøtzsche discusses how network meta-analyses spin the data on antidepressants, especially when financed by pharma.

Cindi Fisher has gone on a hunger strike to demand that her adult child, Siddharta, be freed from Western State Hospital after being suddenly removed from the discharge list without explanation.

On the failures of the publicly funded long-term studies and psychiatry’s fraudulent reporting of these results.

The “It gets better” collection will be a series of republished posts on my website, Beyond Meds, from when I was gravely ill from the psych drug withdrawal process and the following protracted psychiatric drug withdrawal syndrome. So many folks out there are now going through the heinous process of finding their way through psychiatric drug withdrawal syndrome and other iatrogenic injuries from psychiatric drugging. While many find their way through after weeks or months, for others it can take years to really get out of the deep disability and darkness it creates. I’m going to start reposting my personal pieces from those difficult days, so that people can see how far I’ve come and find hope that they too might come out of that darkness and find some peace and joy again.

We suspect that many people would benefit from an alteration in diet and there is certainly growing evidence that improving diet affects physical health. Whether that is true for mental health needs to be more rigorously tested, and we are encouraged that there are studies currently being conducted around the world attempting to manipulate diet to directly test this hypothesis.

I’m glad we’re chipping away at the cracks in psychiatry and psychology and de-privatizing our lives.

On the day I arrived as a freshman at Harvard in the fall of 2001, I dropped my belongings in my dorm room, said...

Soteria-Alaska, a program modeled after the highly effective Soteria developed in the 1970s by the late Loren Mosher, M.D., opened its doors in 2009. It is also impossible to convey the actual simplicity which in fact is the crowning jewel of the Soteria approach. A conservative review of the effectiveness of the Soteria approach revealed that it is at least as effective as traditional hospital-based treatment — without the use of antipsychotic medication as the primary treatment. Considering that people treated in the conventional way die on average 25 years younger than the general population, this is a substantial finding.

It has been indeed an honor to have my story fea­tured on the front pages of the New York Times. It is rare that peo­ple with...

As a parent, and a child psychologist, and just as a person, I believe that acquiescing to the idea that we should simply help people “cope more effectively with things as they perceive them” falls short of the most effective and even most loving response.

The psychiatric hospital of today is a panopticon, a modern prison for the daring mind and for weird behavior. I was once inside and thus, am inviting you to have a look. I will take your hand, and encourage you to join me, on an exploration of the inside of the psychiatric institution. We'll have a small peek, but in reality, it is much more distressing for the one who is being observed.

The crash last week of the Germanwings plane has shocked many. In view of the apparent mental health record of the co-pilot Andreas Lubitz, questions have been asked about the screening policies of airlines. The focus has generally been on the conditions pilots may have or the arguments they might be having with partners or other situational factors that might make them unstable. Even when the issue of the medication a pilot may be taking is raised, it is in the context of policies that permit pilots to continue on drugs like antidepressants to ensure any underlying conditions are effectively treated. But fewer treatments in medicine are effective in this sense than people might think and even when effective they come with effects that need to be balanced against the likely effects of the underlying condition.

Do we bring gifts to our family and community that are born of suffering but infused with spirit? Has our madness been in vain,...