Blogs

Irving Kirsch (the psychologist who has argued that antidepressants offer a marginal advantage over placebos) has agreement from an unlikely source- advertisements from a pharmaceutical company, which agree completely...

On Tuesday April 8, 2014, the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities adopted its first General Comment, on Article 12 which deals with the issue of legal capacity.  It was a moment that brought tears to my eyes and I turned and hugged another woman who was crying - Raquel Jelinek from the Mexican group CONFE, which advocates for the rights of people with intellectual disabilities.  I had not expected the adoption to happen so quickly and had not expected my tears.

Why do stories matter? Why is it that what a psychiatrist says to a patient about their experiences can have such a powerful effect - for good or for ill? This is something that has puzzled me for many years. It still does.

When one is coming off of psychiatric pharmaceuticals, it's common to experience withdrawal induced anxiety, panic and psychosis. Here are some tips to help calm your body.

In the instant I perceive that I’ve succeeded in inducing fear and shame in you, I can feel a palpable relief from my own fear and shame. This process is called projective identification. I gradually learned as a therapist to be aware of when a person seemed to be mysteriously able to create distressful emotional states in me — states that they were themselves subjectively feeling, but weren’t fully aware of.

We have accepted that the busier we keep ourselves, the happier we can expect our lives to be. "Acceptable behavior" is defined by increased productivity across all aspects of life.

Law and spirituality both deal with the issue of responsibility. The law sets out norms and standards promulgated by authorities in accordance with the procedures established by the state, typically set out in a constitution or governing statute, or according to custom. These norms and standards might or might not reflect accurately a consensus about values and principles that are shared by the people governed by them, and might or might not have been adopted in procedures that are satisfyingly participatory and democratic.

A "diagnosis of schizophrenia" is based on two or more of five criteria. Each of these behaviors (or lack of behaviors) can be passed on from generation to generation through normal social learning, without any assumption of a genetically-mediated pathology. Genes transmit biological structure. Structure has an impact on behavior, obviously, but there are always multiple intervening factors.

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.

Although psychiatric researchers have speculated that the rate of people within the (politically-derived, biologically-fictional) racial category of ‘American Indian’ who simultaneously fit into the DSM category of schizophrenia is no greater than the ‘general population,’ we should remember that there’s no word at all for being mentally ill or psychotic or schizophrenic in any traditional language among Native Americans. I feel confident in asserting that’s likely also true for traditional indigenous languages worldwide. This is likely so because visionary, dream-time experiences are not viewed as sickness.

As family support people for those caught in the mental health system, our job is to mitigate as much of the trauma as we can.

Are those diagnosed with “mental illness” more dangerous than other people? Or have we evolved to sense danger from anything that we believe to be different or "strange"?

Millions of people believe that psychiatric medications have saved their lives, while millions of others report that their psychiatric medications were unhelpful or made...