Blogs

On February 19, 2021, the world lost Birgitta Alakare, the former chief psychiatrist at Keropudas Hospital in Tornio, Finland and a pioneer in the development of Open Dialogue.

Online communities are stepping in to help people facing withdrawal effects amass information and receive support for their withdrawal experiences.

Who is really more ill? A person who responds in a natural way to trauma? Or the indifferent society that locates so-called ‘disorders’ within the people that it harms, rather than itself? 

The one core ingredient on which any recovery from emotional distress depends is the one that never makes an appearance in any medical handbook or psychiatric diagnostic manual—that is, love.

With the leadership of industry and their cosseted, lapdog doctors, psychiatric medications are prescribed indiscriminately to nearly anyone entering a physician’s office with a psychological complaint.

We must advocate for policies that create environments that are more nurturing for us all in a society that helps provide people with meaning, a sense of community, and a sense of civic duty.

I believe that, as things are right now, forced treatment can be justifiable. But we need to move studies and research forward, move mental health treatment forward into an era where forced treatment is obsolete.

Behavioral genetic “discoveries” are a mirage, a house of cards that ignores contradictory evidence from countless real-world examples and research findings from other fields, that collapses under serious critical analysis.

Once you have managed to shift the relational dance for a while, you will start to get on with your new life; hopefully you have got far enough forward to establish a new “script”; a new family relational dance.

Unlike hospital treatment, IHT is attentive to family issues and helping negotiate re-entry into work or school. It is also consistent with the recovery principle of least intrusive interventions.

The UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has announced a series of regional consultations on deinstitutionalization.

A discussion of a diagnosis-free approach to working with families called the Relational Awareness Program (RAP) and how family relationships become solidified through “Emotion WARS.”

This essay contributes a biologist’s perspective to identifying humanity’s fundamental needs in our necessary transition to a new world order.

If addictions are existential, and not biological, at their core, then we can start to understand why addiction is not always chronically and progressively compulsive and obsessive.

"Mental health" going mainstream has not actually translated into more connection and healing. Instead, what is mainstream is an individual, isolating notion of "disease."

The day was one long meditation—doing what the mind ordered with no effort to control it. This is the Zen state that monks seek but that physicians consider a mental disorder to be treated by amphetamines.

Dr. Pies claims that the "chemical imbalance" theory was never really professed by psychiatrists. Yet he himself wrote an essay in "Creative Nonfiction" in 1999 that purveyed it directly to the layperson.

Within the current mental health paradigm, profound grief is often shoved into the universal category of depression and treated as a malfunction according to the biomedical model.

Sami Timimi provides a discussion of the ways medication may be helpful for some, and advice and information on discontinuing psychiatric drugs.

What I was able to learn about the injury inflicted by TMS and the culture surrounding it is an incredible insight into the treatment itself and the nature of the medical model in its current form.

Madness Network News, founded in 1972 by two women inmates of Agnews State Hospital, was an anti-psychiatry journal that served as the focal point for organizing throughout North America, and even overseas.

The disease theory of addiction had been ingrained in our culture for 200 years when Nixon signed this law. But had we ever actually checked to see if it was all true?

NISAPI helps people achieve recovery by pairing the normalcy of a ranch and the nurturance of horses with a philosophy of postmodern collaborative practice.

Deconstructing diagnosis, the nature of psychological injury, and how identifying a problem can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Prescribers are taught to prescribe psychiatric medication, but they are often not well-educated about the effects on patients of discontinuing these medications.