Blogs

Today, Saturday, 16 May 2015, a protest was held in Eugene against human rights violations caused by the use of electroshock, a psychiatric procedure involving the running of electricity through the brain. The protest today was one of about two dozen held in about eight countries.

Thousands of boys and young men are lined up in courthouses around the country to sue J&J for gynecomastia caused by taking Risperdal as young children. The condition is irreversible except by surgical removal. Collectively, they have become known as the Risperdal Boys.

It is possible to heal, and at the same time healing also means restoring the part of oneself that can face violence and disobey to protect what is most sacred. I am that sacred, and so are you.

Instead of hope and enthusiasm for their futures, too many children now grow up believing they are inherently defective, and controlled by bad genes and biochemical imbalances. They are shackled by the idea that they have ADHD and then subdued by the drugs that inevitably go along with the diagnosis. Unless something intervenes, many of them will go on to pass their days on Earth in a drug-impaired, demoralized state.

I am quarantined in Stabilization. In front of me an old woman with cherry lipstick and a clipboard asks questions about sexual abuse, but my mind is through the square window on the door behind her. In that room I see a steel bed surrounded by emptiness. On top of it lay leather straps that are uneven in width where they’re wearing thin. Each strap has a set of holes to fasten the buckles tight, and I can see quite clearly that the ones nearest the end are circles while the ones furthest away have stretched into ovals. Tonight will be a Haldol night.

This week, MIA featured a news item regarding a recent “proof of concept” study conducted at Washington University of St. Louis to investigate whether nitrous oxide, commonly known as laughing gas, was effective in reducing symptoms of depression. Why is this a problem?

Allen Frances' latest article: There are problems in the psychiatric field, but none of these problems can be blamed on psychiatry. But the spurious promotion of psychiatric "diagnoses" as real illnesses, and the routine prescribing of chemical and electrical "cures" were and are psychiatric inventions.

The evidence is fast accumulating that systemic inflammation has a causative role in depression, or, at minimum, is a major factor in the chain...

From a shamanic perspective, the biggest mechanism for soul retrieval is not anything mystical at all. It is something with which any adult is familiar. It is grief.

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.

My experience began when I heard two people talking about me when I was home alone. I needed a reasonable explanation, and concluded that it had to be my upstairs neighbors. Then I began to hear the voices outside of my apartment — this new presentation meant that my explanation no longer made sense.

Despite living in Israel for five years, I had no idea that one of the few Soteria houses in the world was only a short train ride away.

For some time now, the medical community—and to a certain extent, the general public—has understood that the reports in the medical literature of industry-funded...

Clinical education must include more training in macro skills that help build the supports, policies, and community infrastructures under-served clients need.

I was in psychiatric treatment for eighteen years. For eighteen years I didn’t get the help I needed. Why didn’t I leave psychiatry long before? What made me stay in something that couldn’t help me and on the contrary worsened my mental health? Why did it take so many years before I turned my back on psychiatry and looked after alternatives?

A psych hospital is like any other institution of total control. You have locked doors around you, there are guard-like mental health workers, and you only have so many ways to get by. Some people choose to sleep all the time. Some people choose to pace. And some people choose, given the right time and the right opportunity, to learn to steal or to get by in other ways.

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.

In the interest of the patients who are currently experiencing withdrawal reactions and the many more who will suffer withdrawal effects in the future, we need to end this “war.” Academic psychiatry must address these problems and conduct thorough research on withdrawal reactions.

This past Thursday I attended the American Psychiatric Association's Institute for Psychiatric Services in San Francisco, and then a talk by the Bay Area Mandala Project on "Providing Loving Receptivity Can Help People in Extreme States." I would like to thank both groups for the motivation to publish this — particularly as they would seem to be at odds in the reductionist "dialogue" we so often have — but really aren't so different in my mind for reasons discussed herein: Who is not "in crisis" for questioning their identity and fit within dominant paradigms?

A career update for members of the “Psychiatry Hall of Shame,” including the group excoriated in the 2008 Congressional investigations, and another psychiatrist who conducted studies aimed at inducing psychosis—experiments that appeared to run counter to the Nuremberg Code of research ethics.

In 1991, Nancy Andreasen began a long-running study of first-episode schizophrenia patients, which involved periodically measuring their brain volumes with magnetic resonance scans. In...

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

Sometimes regarded as “treatment,” psychiatric bullying and harassment can no longer be considered as such. During the past two decades, the often devastating effects of psychiatric bullying and harassment have evidenced themselves on the wellbeing of consumers, and the climate of mental health facilities.The advent of mandatory anti-bullying policies in schools and workplaces has shifted thinking towards an acceptance that bullying occurs, causes harm and should not be tolerated. Could the development of anti-psychiatric bullying policies in mental health institutions make psychiatric abuse visible and create a zero tolerance culture?

Instead of increasing understanding of our differences, the mental health system contributes to the marginalization of people it classifies as mentally ill.

There appears to be increasing acceptance of the idea that lithium prevents suicide, and even that it can reduce mortality rates. For a toxic drug that makes most people feel rather depressed, this seems curious. I did wonder whether it might be having this effect on suicide by sapping people of the will to act, but the proposed effect on mortality seems completely inexplicable. A closer look at the evidence, however, suggests the idea is simply not justified.