Blogs

An update on the Sunrise Center Project, a survivor-run project aiming to help people come off psychiatric drugs using Re-evaluation Counseling. We don’t think it’s down to just the person trying to get off drugs to deal with their issues and feelings about it. We think the people around them need to deal with their own issues and feelings about the process too.

The United Nations calls on countries to repeal their mental health laws that authorize involuntary commitment, and to ensure that mental health services are...

Today we launch our brand new culture section where you can find tips on books and films related to mental health issues, and which contribute to the critical review of the current health paradigm in the psychiatric field. The page also has its own section for poetry.

As awareness spreads about there being something wrong with existing approaches to “psychosis” aka “madness.” Interest grows in exploring what to do instead. One meeting place for exploring this question of “what to do” will be the ISPS conference in NYC in March 2015, which is titled “An International Dialogue on Relationship and Experience in Psychosis.” This conference promises to stand out in terms of the variety of voices,  perspectives, approaches and traditions that it will bring together to focus on the deeper issue of how helpers can best understand and interact with those experiencing what is called psychosis.

In the September, 2015 issue of JAMA Psychiatry, a team of Swedish researchers published a study evaluating the serotonin system in persons with social anxiety. the findings here are in direct contradiction to what the pharmaceutical companies would have us believe: that anxiety and depression are caused by deficit levels of serotonin. There was an editorial by the authors in the same issue which attempted to obfuscate the findings by referencing the heterogeneity in persons who exhibit social anxiety. Unfortunately, neither the article or the editorial referenced the work of neuroscientist who for the past 30 years have been investigating what happens in the brains of animals that are subjected to uncontrollable stress.

There is an enormous irony in a psychiatrist using the epithet "thought police" to express censure, when it is psychiatry itself that routinely incarcerates and forcibly drugs and shocks people on the grounds that their thoughts and speech don't conform to psychiatry's standards of normality.

There is a fascinating process playing out in academic medicine right now. The general public is understandably concerned that much of the medical literature...

My goal now is to focus on solutions for emotional distress, not talking about medical harm. We all know about the problems with medical harm, but not all people are clear about solutions. I'm not that clear, either, but I'm working on it. I'm not talking about revolution any longer, just trying to make my piece of the pie work.

It would be a shame if Andrew Scull’s Madness in Civilization did no more than draw well deserved applause for his authorship and historical expertise, and a prominent place in the bibliography of madness. My own copy of Madness in Civilization arrived last week, and it is great; comprehensive, brilliantly written, lots of colourful and many disturbing illustrations. Madness’ continuing story, “From the Bible to Freud, from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine” is told as never before, but there seems to be something missing...

                              Jacks McNamara is a genderqueer artist, writer, organizer, and healer. Jacks co-founded The Icarus Project and is the subject of the poetic documentary Crooked Beauty. They...

In the post on the debate between Allen Frances and Bob Whitaker, Frances argues that we should all advocate better treatment for those with psychosis. I think that we all might embrace the goal of better, more empathic treatment. However, we will differ on what “better treatment” might entail. I would argue that a return to the state hospital systems of the 1960s would not constitute better treatment.

Toppmøte is Norwegian for ‘summit,’ and Toppmøte2015 is the second of two very successful seminars bringing together professionals, academics, and policymakers with citizens, voters and users of services – under the aegis of the Norwegian ‘Nasjonalt senter for erfaringskompetanse innen psykisk helse’ or “National Centre for Knowledge through Experience in Mental Health.” That’s a rather wonderful organisation, funded by the Norwegian government, which ensures that the experience of people who have used mental health services is reflected in the commissioning, design, management and evaluation of those services.

The BMJ states that it takes on average eight weeks from submission of an article to publication. The review process for Restoring Study 329 took a year, with a three-month review process involving six reviewers to begin with, and then a further four reviews in a four-month process, leading to a provisional acceptance in March that was withdrawn.

(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 am walking through my local park in Copenhagen, Denmark, early in the morning breathing in the fresh smell of damp soil and late summer blooms. I am thinking about my thesis that I have just handed in and the fact that if it is passed I will be a certified psychologist! But, I will not be just any psychologist. I will be Denmark's first official 'Mad' psychologist, joining the ranks of others such as Rufus May, Eleanor Longden, Arnhild Lauveng, and Pat Deegan.

Would you accept money "with no strings attached" from a robber who, in the act of stealing, happened to kill some of his victims? Would you accept money that has been stolen? Would you accept sponsorships from tobacco companies for a meeting about lung diseases? Few doctors would. Why is it then that most doctors willingly accept sponsorships from drug companies that have earned much of their money illegally while being fully aware that their criminal activities have killed thousands of patients, the very people whose interests doctors are supposed to take care of?

Every story is unique. But the path always leads back to one’s Authentic Being. Love is the sustenance, and authenticity is the fountain of our aliveness. Yes we are talking about psychiatry here. All of psychiatry flows from damage to our plays of consciousness. This damage comes from trauma, abuse and deprivation, in our formative years. Additional trauma can rewrite and darken our plays at any time for the rest of our lives. The interplay between our temperaments and problematic experience generates psychiatric struggle. This encompasses all of psychiatry, period.

There I was on my first night of Outward Bound, lying under the big Texas sky in a little town called Redford, amidst waxy...

Just had to share this with you. Was copied on an e-mail from Allen Frances yesterday, wherein he informed colleagues that two blogs had...

Last week the Sandy Hook Advisory Commission threw another crumb to the masses, letting them know that, well, even though they can’t get any of the records and documents they want, they’ll forge ahead and produce a report, making mental health recommendations, that has absolutely nothing to do with Adam Lanza’s mental health history.

This is the world that lies in store for us. It is not the world of traditional medicine, where drugs treat diseases to restore the social order. It is a world in which medical interventions will potentially change that order.

A Note to the Reader: Thorough searches of my memory reserves have failed to provide me with a complete and detailed account of my...

As the medical director of a community mental health center, my colleagues look to me for guidance on how to approach the new edition of the DSM. How many should we buy? How much time should be devoted to staff training? This is my answer.

It's amazing how much life or death conversation and thinking psych drugs inspire. In a way this seems to miss the point since our lives are obviously about something far more profound than weird chemical combinations that we don't understand. Yet they are what our first-world society has in place to respond to the life or death existential (and holy) questions and crises people tackle.

I am being asked by a number of grassroots communities to facilitate a dialogue about how they can better welcome and support individuals who experience emotional distress. This is a challenge for many aspiring peers and allies in a culture where responsibility for our individual well-being has been increasingly transferred to psychiatrists, doctors, and other health professionals.