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Subtly and insidiously, my medications, once merely inert composites of chemicals, acquired an agency of their own and took center stage in my life...

If I were in charge of distributing NIH grant money, I’d be sending a lot of it to researchers like Erick Turner, a psychiatrist...

I think I have underestimated just how hard it can be for people to approach mental health problems from a psychological and social perspective. The longer I work with people who are experiencing severe psychological distress, the more they teach me about the difficulties involved in breaking away from an “illness” mindset. Medications, by and large, are still the mainstay of helping people with psychological troubles despite an increasingly widespread acceptance that psychological problems are not medical problems. Mental illness is an “illness” only in the same way that love-sickness is an illness.

Depressed, anxious, and substance-abusing people can beat themselves up for being defective. And psychiatrists and psychologists routinely validate and intensify their sense of defectiveness by telling them that they have, for example, a chemical-imbalance defect, a genetic defect, or a cognitive-behavioral defect. For some of these people, it feels better to believe that they are essentially defective. But the “defect/medical model of mental illness” is counterproductive for many other people—especially those “untalented” in denial and self-deception—for whom there is another model and path that works much better.

If we look at stigma as arising from the fear of things perceived as unfamiliar and judged abnormal, then we must think of challenging stigma by making the characteristics associated with stigma more familiar and thus less fearful. For me, central to stigma is discrimination and exclusion. The antidote: working with someone as a colleague, knowing such a person as a neighbor and friend.

My last blog on this site was about how our federal and state governments are looking to make huge changes to our health care...

I was glad to see that the New York Times' reporters covering GlaxoSmithKline's $3 billion settlement tipped their hat to former New York Attorney...

Service users and survivors who work in a behavioral health settings are faced with important questions about whether or not to share their lived experience and when. We may ask ourselves: Am I ready? What about the risks and politics of disclosure? How do I address an associated expectation or barrier, or deal with the possibility of discrimination? What kind of support is available to me in the process? I’m pleased to announce Sharing Experience Lived Firsthand (SELF).

I imagine that everybody on this side of the issue knows by now that the eminent psychiatrist Jeffrey Lieberman, MD, Chief Psychiatrist at Columbia, and past President of the APA, called Robert Whitaker "a menace to society." The grounds for Dr. Lieberman's vituperation were that Robert had dared to challenge some of psychiatry's most sacred tenets! But in all the furor, it was largely ignored that in the same interview Dr. Lieberman had said something else that warrants additional discussion.

He could have asked me if there was a specific event that had precipitated my suicide attempt. He could have asked if I had a history of trauma. He could have simply asked, “What happened?” “What are you feeling?” or “So what’s going on?” Nope. He chose to open our meeting with an accusatory remark about a make-believe eating disorder.

While I struggle with whether I can work in an ethical way when there are forces and perspectives prominent in our culture that are antithetical to mine, I have kept my day job as a psychiatrist in a community mental health center in Vermont. This is a reflection on that work and the value I observe in the efforts of my colleagues day in and day out.

The Anything But the Company Drug playbook involved digging deep into the medical records of the person reporting a problem in order to find the ingrown toenail at the age of two that was possibly the cause. And of course if something else was possibly the cause, then we can’t conclude that our drug did it.

Bob-- An encounter from this week: I saw a 24 year-old theater actress who was started on Lexapro nine months ago for a one-time "panic attack"...

Recently one blogger pointed out how managed care systems might be a violation of human rights. I've also been recently posting about how the...

In Paris today we have a lot of people mouthing words that come easily: "Je Suis Charlie." For anyone who wants to be Charlie, who wants to get to know what modern politics is all about, by feeling it in your marrow, try reporting an adverse event on treatment to your doctor. Outside your doctor’s surgery/clinic/ consultation room you can believe you are operating in a democracy. Inside the room you may be treated with courtesy and apparent friendliness but you are being treated in an arrangement set in place to police addicts. This is not a domain in which ideals of Liberty, Equality or Fraternity are welcome.

As I was researching my book A Disease called Childhood: Why A.D.H.D. Became an American Epidemic, I came across an interesting pattern in the history of psychiatry. In my mind I made up a name for this pattern and called it “neo-Kraepelinian Regret,” named after the 19^th century German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin. Kraepelin was interested in classifying mental disorders by their symptoms so that psychiatrists would have a common language with which to communicate. His most famous contribution is his classification of the different forms of psychosis into manic depression, dementia praecox (which later became known as schizophrenia), and paranoia.

Even as we have access to more and more information linking that which gets labeled mental illness to trauma — treatment that exacerbates the trauma response continues to gain legal traction all over the country. This, of course, leads to the epidemic of harm and iatrogenic illness we’re watching happen. (See: Anatomy of an Epidemic.)

In addition to hosting the Panorama programs and The Famous Grouse history of Study 329, Study329.org has a comprehensive timeline on the origins of concerns about the SSRIs and the risk of suicide, initially with Prozac and subsequently with Paxil/Seroxat. The hope is to provide a comprehensive repository for anyone who wants to study SSRIs, RCTs, and Study 329 in particular.

How convenient to be able to deposit all our hatred, anger, fear, and worry into a pail that looks different and believes in stuff we don't understand. Or better yet, to be able to throw all of our sorrow, hatred, and pain into an abstract bin organized by the greatest piece of trash: the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM).

Our current, reductionistic approach to mental health issues doesn’t offer any insights or explanations on the etiology of most mental disturbances. Similarly, medication assisted treatment (MAT) focuses on the surface symptoms of opiate abuse without addressing the underlying causes of overwhelming distress and pain.

Imagine that you got upset. Is it very remarkable that I can “diagnose” that you are upset? After all, you are clearly upset. What expert thing did I accomplish by agreeing with you that you were upset? Or imagine that you are angry. Is it very remarkable that I can “diagnose” that you are angry? After all, you are clearly angry. Have I added anything meaningful by saying “I diagnose that you are angry” instead of “You seem angry”? “You look upset” is the simple, truthful thing to say and “I diagnose that you look upset” is a piece of self-serving chicanery.

Dog assisted psychotherapy is mostly used within the psychodynamic theory. It's especially useful in treatment with children and adolescents, where dogs seems to pass "under the radar" of children's logical defense.

A variety of scenarios of social and economic collapse have gone through many of our minds since Election Day. Insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies want to keep people on drugs, but what if there was no government subsidy for those who can’t pay?

Like everyone else, I was shocked and stunned by the senseless mass killing of young children and adults in Newtown, Connecticut. The families and community deserve their chance to mourn and search for their own meaning and healing. However, I cannot be silent about the threats now being made against my community, as people respond to this act of terrible violence. The aggressive legislation against people labeled with psychiatric diagnoses that is being promoted by the NRA and by Representative Sensenbrenner, among others, is not a fit way to honor anyone's life.

Dear Bob: Saw a young man recently, early 30s, who wanted help withdrawing from benzodiazepines. He had been on escalating doses of Xanax for two years.  The...