Blogs

With all eyes on Britney, we must unmask the role of psychiatrists in court hearings like hers, where basically what the shrink says, goes— and the person’s freedom and human rights are stripped away.

Peter Gøtzsche describes trying to join the psychiatric establishment to bring attention to critical issues from the inside.

There are currently ten classes of prescription medications that impair brain function, including both psychiatric and non-psychiatric drugs. A number of non-drug “treatments” do the same.

Paula Caplan, known for her fierce criticism of psychiatry and its diagnostic manual, died Wednesday at age 74.

Peter Gøtzsche explains how psychiatry has reacted when confronted with evidence and stories of lived experience, and how this has corrupted journalism.

“Prescripticide”: The purpose of this informational video is to raise public awareness of this association between psychiatric drugs and violence/suicide.

The adage that one must step outside their comfort zone if one wants to achieve success is troubling, and it’s time to stop letting it go unquestioned.

Peter Gøtzsche explains how newspapers and film festivals censor the work of journalists and filmmakers in order to appease the pharmaceutical industry.

Discussing informed consent, risk/benefit ratios, and the many sources of bias in clinical trials for drugs, in order to help the layperson better understand the research.

So many of us young women believed the people who told us we needed them to make us healthy, who told us that without them, we’d be at the mercy of untameable "disease."

"Overprescribing Madness" explains how our sane social, political-economic distress responses have become medicalized into a mental illness epidemic.

Inaction by the medical profession regarding the prescribing of psychiatric drugs to children and adolescents is a form of child abuse and neglect, and institutional betrayal.

Se-REM is a self-help version of EMDR that uses sound instead of eye movement for bilateral stimulation. My clients have reported finding it helpful for healing from trauma.

Peter Gøtzsche discusses the ways in which young psychiatrists can stand up to the system and fight for change in psychiatry.

James Davies on the medicalization and individualizing of distress and its connection to neoliberal ideology, and the need to focus on pervasive inequality and other social causes.

The basic assumptions behind unethical practices like lobotomies and insulin shock therapy are still the foundation on which psychiatry’s main treatments are built today.

Many of the harms associated with drugs were very much rooted in policy choices rather than in the nature of the drugs being used, or even addiction in general.

Peter Gøtzsche gives advice on what withdrawal symptoms may look like and explains the dangers of—and alternatives to—forced treatment.

Rather than medicalizing distress, EMDR provides a way of healing from trauma. EMDR isn't about trying to treat the symptoms of an illness. It's about healing from the root cause.

Results from a national study show the transformational qualities of Hearing Voices groups, including their egalitarian structure and the genuine connection they foster.

The FDA approved Biogen's failed drug aducanumab, overriding the 10-0 recommendation of its own advisory committee. Three panel members resigned in protest.

In 1991, we conducted a study and found that psychotherapy saved money compared with drug treatment. We also found rampant overprescribing.

Withdraw from psychiatric drugs at your own speed—according to what you feel. Don’t reduce again before you feel stabilised on the previous dose.

In "Mud Flower," Meghan Caughey seeks an ethics centered on the valuation of madness—and on art as one communicative pathway for values—for the muddy waters discarded by society.

Psychiatrists have made hundreds of millions of people dependent on psychiatric drugs and yet have done virtually nothing to find out how to help the patients come off them again.