Blogs

Essays by a diverse group of writers, in the United States and abroad, engaged in rethinking psychiatry. (The directory of personal stories can be found here, and initiatives here).

Our Task Is to Take Away the Power of Psychiatry

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Taking away the power of psychiatry? How naive, some of you say. It can never happen. Anyway, some others say, why would we even want to do that? This comes especially from those who have been appointed by the psychiatric establishment to be our leaders, some of whom imagine themselves as becoming the leaders of psychiatry themselves.. And some people who I greatly respect say we should just focus on creating alternatives to the present system.

Trauma Informed Care Meets Pharma Informed Care

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The National Council on Trauma Informed Care asserts that “knowledge about the prevalence and impact of trauma has grown to the point that it is now universally understood that almost all of those seeking services in public mental health have trauma histories.” A central tenet of trauma informed care is flipping the paradigm, from asking “what’s wrong with you?” to asking “what’s happened to you?”

Can Psychosis be Treated With Nutrition?

We are immersed these days in the erroneous idea that only randomized placebo-controlled studies (RCTs) constitute scientific data. We will discuss the origins of the over-reliance on RCTs in a future column. For now, we shall simply assume that many of our readers understand that a well-documented case study can provide information relevant to many. And so, we would like to tell you about a Calgary-based child who we refer to as ‘Andrew’.

Understanding Madness as Revolution, Then Working Toward Peace

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While some will frame Eleanor Longden’s story, told in her awesome TED video (which has now been viewed about 1/2 million times!), as the triumph of an individual struggling against “mental illness,” I believe the story might better be seen as a refutation of the whole “illness of the mind” metaphor, and as an indication of a desperate need for a new paradigm.

Call to Action: Support a Bill for Informed Benzodiazepine Use

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Massachusetts Bill HD 4554 needs to gain sufficient state representative support by Tuesday, March 1, 2016. This bill will put restrictions on the prescribing of benzodiazepines and non-benzodiazepine sleep aids, and will require that all patients be informed of the potential dangers of these drugs, specifically the dangers of long-term use.

A Curse for a Cursed Profession

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In “polite society,” cursing is largely verboten. Let me suggest, however, that if done in the correct spirit and adroitly, cursing can be a highly useful type of anti-oppression work. On top of which, it can be personally liberating.

Think About Mental Health Wellness for Your End-of-year Donations

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We hope we have convinced you by now (this is our 24th blog) that the field of Nutrition and Mental Health is a vital piece of the solution, for preventing as well as treating mental health problems. What we have not talked to you about at all is how behind-the-times the regular granting agencies are. The two of us have always been very successful at obtaining research grants, as long as we do not want to study multinutrient treatments. When we (and some other colleagues in the U.S.) want to study multinutrient formulas, the reviewers react by asking “but which is the important ingredient?”

Code Black: When Time Doesn’t Heal

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In the world of emergency medicine time is a critical resource. But Ryan McGarry, ER physician and stage IV lymphoma survivor, understands at the bone that idle minutes mean something very different to a patient. He recalls “waiting on news if the therapy is working . . . is there more disease that we didn’t know about, is it getting bigger . . . the clock was torture, watching that dial go around is torture.” McGarry horridly remembers what it’s like to wait on a simple, overdue dose of anti-nausea medication. He reflects, “You’re clearly at an advantage as a physician or provider at any level if you’ve been a patient. It’s just an unbeatable perspective.”
anti-psychiatry pointing out glass house of psychiatry

In Defense of Anti-Psychiatry

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Last year, Ronald Pies, MD and Mark Ruffalo, LCSW published an article titled "The Reality of Mental Illness." In it they claim that "most of what is asserted by antipsychiatry is easily refuted by the scientific evidence." Why then do they not refute it? The reality is that they malign us because they have no rational response to our criticisms.

Dialogical Recovery of our Minds

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I think that our mind and our capacity to use it to think clearly depends on our inner and outer dialogue. When we become...

‘I’d Rather Die Than Go Back to Hospital’: Why We Need a Non-medical Crisis...

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It was exciting going back to my old stamping ground. Years ago I’d worked in one of the local community mental health teams and had referred many women to the Drayton Park Crisis House. Walking up the steps of the house brought back memories of standing there with desperate and suicidal clients, some of whom had told me that they would rather die than go back into hospital. As you can imagine, to say I had been glad that there was an alternative would have been an understatement.

My Favorite Fears and How They May Serve Us

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As I’ve worked in the system in a peer support role I’ve become aware that I’m at risk of being "ideologic." In some ways, being involved in the c/s/x movement has felt like joining a new church. I don’t actually think there’s anything wrong with this; as was the case in my religious community, we are united around something that we believe in strongly and feel a responsibility to bring to the world. Being part of a group like this is empowering, inspiring, and hopeful. But it also scares me.

The Making of “Guilty Except for Insanity: Maddening Journeys Through an Asylum”

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Before entering the field of psychology in the 1970s, I worked as a psychiatric nurse, gravitating to the community mental health movement, and then to anti-psychiatry politics. As a nurse at a psychiatric hospital in Santa Monica, also involved in union organizing and direct action politics with a feminist health collective, I was drawn to the radical wing of community mental health. Decades later, in producing a documentary film on the stories of people who entered the state psychiatric hospital in Oregon under the insanity plea, I had the chance to look back on that era through the lens of a fiction film that had made this hospital so famous.

Is My Therapist Good or Not?

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I frequently get asked by people on the internet whether or not I think their therapist is good. For a variety of reasons, I usually do not feel comfortable answering them directly. However, I do feel comfortable writing about the subject here, as a sort of amalgamated response. As such, here are some questions I might ask such people, and here is how I might respond to their answers.

It Gets Better: A Portrait of Poly Psychopharmacology

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The “It gets better” collection will be a series of republished posts on my website, Beyond Meds, from when I was gravely ill from the psych drug withdrawal process and the following protracted psychiatric drug withdrawal syndrome. So many folks out there are now going through the heinous process of finding their way through psychiatric drug withdrawal syndrome and other iatrogenic injuries from psychiatric drugging. While many find their way through after weeks or months, for others it can take years to really get out of the deep disability and darkness it creates. I’m going to start reposting my personal pieces from those difficult days, so that people can see how far I’ve come and find hope that they too might come out of that darkness and find some peace and joy again.
projective identification

Letting Negative Projective Identifications Come, and Letting Them Go

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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.

Tolstoy’s Hermit: Jay Schulkin

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Jay Schulkin, a neuroscientist and philosopher of prodigious curiosity and energy, has died at age 70 of hepatic cancer.
A brain in a jar

My Impressions of Psychiatry

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People who are given the diagnosis of “schizophrenia” are the last social group not to be accepted by the public. 

Critical Psychiatry Textbook, Chapter 9: ADHD (Part Three)

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ADHD is a disaster area, in terms of the diagnosis, clinical research, and the harms inflicted on hundreds of millions of healthy people.
ritalin use in france

Countervailing Forces Against Ritalin Use in France

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A new study in the journal Social Science and Medicine explores why French children take stimulants far less than children in the United States. The study looks at how particular forces in society, in concert with government agencies, became an effective check on stimulant marketing for kids in France.
DIY lobotomy

Psychiatry’s War on Free Will

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Psychiatry’s main role was always to forcibly negate the free will of society’s outliers. Its methods included forced removal, confinement, and electrical, surgical, and chemical lobotomy. But then it sought to lure non-outliers into willingly allowing psychiatry to negate their free will, too. So it devised ways to trick people into "lobotomizing" themselves.
Illustration of a head with hands over eyes and the word "PROPAGANDA"

The Media’s False Narrative About Depression Pills, Suicides, and Saving Lives

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When the media tell of a serious harm of a psychiatric drug, they follow a standard script, including that they must also praise the drug.

Robin Williams or Patch Adams? Watch a Brief Message from David Oaks to the...

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You may watch a little eight-minute video message, below, that I sent this past Sunday, October 12, 2014, especially created to be shown during the gala dinner for the Mad In America International Film Festival. The festival brought together many movies that challenge the mental health industry. I wish I could have been there physically because this certainly was one of the main Mad Culture events of the season and many activists, film makers, and other creative folks were in attendance.
anti-authoritarian resistance

Fighting the Suppression of Dissent: A Guidebook for Those Who Refuse to Conform

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Political, educational, and mental health fields are joining forces in ever more powerful authoritarian rule. The DSM, proclaimed to be a scientific guidebook, is little more than a political instrument used to control undesirable behaviors and experiences. Who will fight for our rights when everybody is tranquilized into conformity?

Can a Profession Be any More Confused?

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Yesterday I attended psychiatry grand rounds, where Andy Miller presented his latest research. Andy has been a pioneer in the field of psychoneuroimmunology and an exponent for the view that major depression reflects systemic inflammation. (I have published a review of this literature recently in Frontiers in Psychology which is available for download).