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Psychiatry, under the guise of science, tries to identify and manage those who deviate from industrial society's norms.

Many teenagers and young adults (the group for whom suicide is the second leading cause of death) are anti-authoritarians. For them, the idea that they're experiencing a crisis of self rather than a mental illness can reduce their pain, increase their hope and open them up for dialogue.

Many families trying to support someone in psychosis fall into the same trap professionals find themselves caught in: power struggles: "How can I make my relative change? What should I do to get them to see they are sick?" While it's hard to argue with wanting someone to get better, control and conformity are at the heart of everything wrong with the standard psychiatric approach. The deeper families dig themselves into forcing change on their relative, the more they flounder.

It has been a little more than a year since you perhaps read Rob Wipond's story about Siddharta and I, From Compliance to Activism: A Mother’s Story. Some of you may remember that in August 2014, Siddharta was freed at last. His recovery from years of being drugged and treated as less than human, and the traumatization of confinements and imprisonment became my main focus. And how is Siddharta doing now? Well as his Mother, I would say he has made remarkable progress!

On November 4, the Health Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce (E&C) Committee marked up an amended version of the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act of 2015 (H.R. 2646), introduced by Rep. Tim Murphy (R-PA) and Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX). However, the bill still does not reflect the voices or meet the needs of millions of Americans with lived experience of mental health conditions because the E&C Health Subcommittee failed to incorporate our recommendations.

Robert Plomin's Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are was seen as a "declaration of victory of nature over nurture." Plomin has a 40-year track record of unfulfilled gene discovery claims and predictions, and there is every reason to believe that his new polygenic score claims and predictions are merely a continuation of this trend.

I don't know about you, but sound, audio, music, making mixes on spotify, catching up on my favorite standards on pandora keeps me well...

Various instruments of the United Nations have commented on forced treatment, or involuntary confinement, or both (for details, see Burstow, 2015a), and a number of truly critical additions to international law have materialized. Arguably, the most significant of these is the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. What makes it so significant? For one thing, it is because this landmark convention puts forward nothing less than a total ban on both involuntary treatment and the involuntary confinement of people who have broken no laws.

Documented cases show a link between SSRIs and school violence, but pharma has suppressed the data that could prove this link.

There is little denying the power of story… until our own stories get taken from us, positioned against us, and used to determine our value as some sort of human commodity. We deserve to have our stories heard and to hear the stories of others, but on our own terms, without being fetishized or controlled, and without competition for paltry awards and recognition.

David Cohen's work begins to address a paradox: medication effects are not simply chemical impacts on a biological brain, but rather the complex interactions of social factors, expectation, placebo, "nocebo," and learning. As a harm reduction approach to withdrawal emphasizes, empowerment may be the most important consideration for supporting people's wellness.

Unfortunately, the problems that sometimes occur when people try to stop an SSRI antidepressant are still severe and long-lasting.

This is the cover letter that Mad in America Foundation sent to Niall Boyce, editor of Lancet Psychiatry, requesting that the journal retract Martine Hoogman's study of "subcortical brain volumes" in those diagnosed with ADHD.

On August 13, Mad in America and three partner organizations will present four international experts to discuss the problem of the widespread psychiatric drugging of children—and seek solutions.

Researchers admit their suicide risk assessments work only about as well as random guessing, and they can lead to harm. We can instead focus on finding new ways to form connections that might help tether someone to this world.

The idea of spending more time as a bureaucrat in the US Embassy in Iceland did not appeal to me. I longed for the freedom that academics have. While pursuing that dream I stumbled into the world of international media, “chemical imbalance”, book publishing and a greedy professor of psychiatry which was a prelude to my second annus horribilis.

Why we should be deeply disturbed by the largely fictional ‘mental illness’ narrative and its resultant system, why we should be suspicious of who actually benefits from the whole enterprise, and, most importantly, why we can no longer countenance the unconscionable toll it takes on the health and well-being of ordinary citizens.

This Wednesday, March 19th I will be speaking with the wonderful folks at Rethinking Psychiatry in Portland Oregon. These amazing individuals are working on reforming the mental health system and creating practical alternatives such as a Soteria-based housing model in the community. As I look at the present state of how we help people in severe emotional crisis I see enormous problems from beginning to end. I want to outline some of those main problems and then look at some ways we could work to reform them.

I am writing this letter, after much consideration, in the depths of benzodiazepine withdrawal. I need to be a voice in the midst of silence; I need to be heard before you write one more prescription for a benzo or any other mind-altering drug for that matter. It is my hope in writing this that you begin to ask questions as you sit across from your patients: why are they depressed, anxious, insecure, fatigued, paranoid, agoraphobic? Are the drugs I so readily prescribe contributing to their declining physical, mental and emotional health? Are these drugs really the answer? What are they really doing to the brain?

What the doctors are not seeing is the health in people—except when it’s convenient for them and their research projects.

I was recently asked to contrast my views on psychosis and recovery with those offered by NAVIGATE, a US government (NIMH) sponsored program aiming to guide early intervention programs for psychosis. This inspired me to inquire into what NAVIGATE does tell people and families about psychosis and recovery. What I found, unfortunately, was quite disturbing.

If you looked at photos of Luke Montagu in the grounds of Mapperton, his stunning ancestral manor, you might well envy his lot. Look closer and you’ll sense that his story has not always been one of wine and roses, for the next Lord Sandwich has spent most of the last seven years in hell, thanks to the interventions of drug-obsessed psychiatrists. Yet, though his experience was heartbreaking, often terrifying, it is now becoming a story full of hope and resilience, of grace and grit, for he has co-founded the Council for Evidence-based Psychiatry as his contribution to the information war on the false or misleading claims made about the benefits of psychotropic drugs.

In the post on the debate between Allen Frances and Bob Whitaker, Frances argues that we should all advocate better treatment for those with psychosis. I think that we all might embrace the goal of better, more empathic treatment. However, we will differ on what “better treatment” might entail. I would argue that a return to the state hospital systems of the 1960s would not constitute better treatment.

On March 5, Bruce Levine, PhD, published an interesting article on Mad in America  titled Psychiatry Now Admits It's Been Wrong in Big Ways – But Can It Change? Bruce had interviewed Robert Whitaker, and notes that Robert, in his book Mad in America, had challenged some fundamental tenets of psychiatry, including the validity of its "diagnoses" and the efficacy (especially the long-term efficacy) of its treatments. Bruce reminds us that Robert initially incurred a good deal of psychiatric wrath in this regard, but also points out that some members of the psychiatric establishment are beginning to express a measure of agreement with these deviations from long-held psychiatric orthodoxy.

“What do you think caused your problems?,” I asked. “I have a chemical imbalance, a chemical imbalance, an imbalance in the brain that makes me ill.”