Does Pharma Need the Entrepreneur?
Capitalists donāt discover new medicine; they invest in it. The incentive to do so, as everyone will admit, is to return a profit. Most would also agree that this profit shouldnāt be "too large," but enough to encourage adequate investment into new treatments. However, the idea that this is a well-functioning system, and indeed the best way of producing medicine, is a myth.
“Multigenerational Poverty”
The practice of medicine in our country is being swallowed whole by a snake. The snake started with the poor, the black, the brown; the already disenfranchised of the deep south and inner cities many years ago. It was an easy sell to the better-off taxpayers. Who wants to give up money to take care of poor people?
Making a Mad Community, from Attic to Attic: Part Two
Editorās note: This is part two of a two-part essay. The first part described Jessicaās personal experiences with involuntary commitment, the psychiatric system, and...
What Happened to those Who Were Suicidal in Study 329? And to the Learned...
In May 2014, the RIAT team asked GSK what the children who became suicidal in the course of Study 329 have since been told. The consent form says that anyone entering the study would be treated just the way they would be in normal clinical practice. In Study 329, the children taking imipramine were by design force titrated upwards to doses of the order of 300 mg, which is close to double the dose of imipramine given in adult trials by GSK or in normal clinical practice. In normal clinical practice it would be usual to inform somebody who had become suicidal on an SSRI that the treatment had caused their problem.
The House of Cards with Informed Consent Standards
I recently submitted a recommendation to Oregonās mental health officials as they consider revising their clinical standards. If adopted, my proposal will open the door to a much wider recognition of the role that poorly conducted informed consent plays in the excessive use of psychiatric medications.
NCMHR Does Not Speak for Me
I am appalled to read a press release by the National Coalition for Mental Health Recovery that lauds the proposals emerging from the Vice President's Task Force and accepts in principle a national database of individuals with mental health diagnoses that is "limited to those with a known history of violence."
In Time for RXmas: Motivational Pharmacotherapy
Drug profitability requires three parties to work together ā drug companies to make the drugs, psychiatrists to prescribe them and consumers to take them. Too often, though, patients have failed to play nicely and do their bit. They have banged on about tiresome things like adverse reactions and alternative treatments, they have expressed foolish opposition to the very concept of pharmacotherapy and questioned its efficacy. They have become medication non-compliant and undermined the profits of the pharmaceutical industry and the authority of psychiatry. They have been bad and landed themselves on a lot of peopleās naughty lists and made the World Health Organization very sad and worried.
Please Respond to the New York Times: āWhat Should Be Done to Prevent Mass...
As I write this, the New York Times is asking readers to respond to the question āWhat should be done to prevent mass shootings?ā The more responses the New York Times receives from people who understand that the answer is gun control ā not misguided legislation that would only harm those it purports to help ā the more they will take notice. Please write!
A Developmental Response to Trauma and Trauma Language
Understanding life events (and/or our responses to them) as trauma has transformed how we suffer and how we relate to pain.
Making Sense of Being Crazy in a Crazy World: A Community Poll
Hey Mad in America Community! Happy New Year! I want to share an exciting project with you that's going on at The Icarus Project. Members of The Icarus project have been imagining maps and roads and labyrinths that would lead us in our journey and ground us in the moment. These have been called āwellness mapsā or āmad mapsā ā reminder documents we create for ourselves and the people around us about our wellness goals, warning signs, strategies for health and who we trust to look out for our best interests when weāre not at our best. As I've been saying for years, āThe act of figuring out what it means personally to be healthy is about learning to leave a trail back to how we want to be. The clearer we articulate it, the easier it is to get back there.ā
Recovery ā From Personal Reform to Social Change
From Mad in Sweden. One of the most important contributions made by research on recovery, is understanding people diagnosed with āsevere mental health problemsā, as not merely victims of an illness, but as agents in their own lives.
Towards a Healthcare Magna Carta, Part One
The area of politics that counts most for most of us is healthcare. Big Healthcare is now the biggest business in the United States and in the Western World. We desperately need a new compact between we the people and those who govern our healthcare ā or at least a new compact between the doctors who make money for pharma by putting pills in our mouths and the pharmas of this world. Instead, we are told that to question the judgments of the scientific literature is to engage in an irrational War on Science itself.
We Are Failing Our Kids: A Few Remedies
Are colleges unrealistic in their demands academically, or are we failing to equip our children with the tools they need to live mentally and emotionally healthy lives? Iām leaning toward the latter. We need to provide more support for todayās college students and raise awareness that mental and emotional distress is not something one should suffer alone. It is our responsibility as a society to prepare our kids for life.
Turning a Child’s Intensity to Greatness
My passion in the medication debate stems from my clinical work with families with challenging and intense children. I got to see that with 2-3 weeks - at most within 2-3 months for the most difficult children - that the very same intensity that had gone awry became the very fuel for that child's greatness.
My Peer Service Work
My work in peer service stems from the giving back to my community, yes, but itās more than that. I do it because I canāt do anything else. I love this work. I love consumer 1:1 contact and prefer to be in the background otherwise because I donāt like attention.
Avoiding Stress After Diagnosis
I am constantly around people who build their lives around negative beliefs. More specifically, I am around people that build their lives around being ābrokenā because of something they identify as being a ābrain disease.ā It breaks my heart to hear the way people view themselves.
WHOMHP!
An Imaginary Conversation Between a World Health Organization Mental Health Provider and an Indigenous Scientist
Helpful and Hopeful Thoughts
The basic idea behind successful psychotherapy is that our thoughts create our feelings. And, luckily, our thoughts are changeable. I have personally experienced how liberating only one thought can be to a complex problem. That's why I would precent some of the thoughts that I have found most useful personally, and in therapy with patients, over 25 years.
A Stranger in a Strange Land (Pt. 1)
Many months ago I wrote a guest piece on Mad In America entitled, āCorrections Officers, Not Clinicians.ā And since that time I have walked away from that job because of the irreconcilable conflicts between its mission and my own heart. I have become convinced that, as an institution, the public mental health system of the United States is a disaster. There are always individuals within any system who are doing noble, beautiful things - For me, one part of my path toward healing included the connection I made with a therapist - But that doesnāt absolve us of the responsibility to confront institutional norms that are oppressive and dehumanizing.
Yesterday I Looked Forward to Taking Psych Drugs
People hassle me for being anti-medication, and I always tell them I am NOT anti-medication; I am pro-fully-informed choice. But people like things black-and-white. They see me as being against medications, and so I'm telling you why medications may have saved my life yesterday, or at least saved me a whole bunch more trouble.
Effective Tactics for the āRehumanizing Resistanceā: Real Politics 101, Part Two
In Part Two, I discuss strategy and tactics for the Rehumanizing Resistance, including: (1) Traditional, Personal, and Underground Politics; (2) Direct Action and Confrontation: When It Can and Cannot Succeed (3) Organizing: Taking Advantage of the Current Cultural Climate; (4) Alliances and Coalitions; and (5) Film and Media. In Part One, I discussed how the Resistance has been winning scientific battles but losing the war against the expansion of influence of First-Order Psychiatry (which includes American Psychiatric Association and Big Pharma), and how this is due in large part to the First-Orderās effective political tactics and the Resistanceās political naivety.
Return to Self an Alternative Medication?
After nearly two years in Utah, from 2008-2009, I made the decision to return to the splendor of the Pacific Northwest where I had...
Hiding the Evidence of Society’s Side Effects
What better way to keep people who have been dehumanized due to repeated traumatic experiences, and marginalized and stigmatized due their emotional distress, quiet and invisible than to do it legally and medically? Is there no better place to hide people who, when visible, are proof of social and psychiatric failure than in locked institutions? I have worked with many such individuals in the LA County Jail, and the locked inpatient wards, and in each case the institutionās process ā although in compliance with legal and medical protocols ā seemed to conspire to keep the individual powerless, medicated, isolated and confused.
Do I Have Too Many Questions This Morning?
What if it were the sun that could cure you; would you have the courage to go and find it? Would you wear sunscreen?
If...
Venomagnosia
InĀ Ordinarily Well: The Case for Antidepressants, Dr. Peter Kramer makes two arguments that I agree with. The trouble for me is that Kramerās clinical vision seems strangely rose-tinted. He is an advocate of using antidepressants to treat depression, but he doesnāt seem to see any of the problems antidepressants cause.