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My doctor didn’t tell me about any side effects, and I didn’t ask. I assumed that if there were any risks with taking Paxil, he would tell me.

In any society that prioritizes economic efficiency, productivity and order above life and all of life’s varieties, people experiencing altered and extreme emotional states will be seen as defective and as burdens—monkey wrenches that disturb the societal assembly line.

SAMHSA should be commended for undertaking an important educational task with laudable goals. Unfortunately, I have to conclude that SAMHSA’s Recovery to Practice module on medications for psychiatrists is a very minimal and even misleading attempt at educating psychiatrists.

During my confinement, I became convinced that the forced repression of my homosexuality was the true etiology of my schizophrenia.

It is often not appreciated by the individuals receiving electrically induced convulsions that any gains they receive from the procedure will almost certainly be short-lived, and that the "treatment" will need to be repeated more or less indefinitely at intervals of about a month. Case studies can be helpful and informative, but they tell us little or nothing on the general questions of safety and efficacy.

Every time I agreed to 'treatment’, I was told that it was necessary to save my life. I was sold a bunch of lies.

The problem with authoritarianism is that it shuts down the possibility of ordinary people (that’s all of us) creating anything new. Can therapists give up our addiction to knowing what’s “the right path,” what’s the “smart” answer, what’s the solution to the problem, in favor of supporting our clients to create new ways of building their lives?

I will be traveling from Alaska to attend the protest of the American Psychiatric Association in New York, because psychiatry is a morally and scientifically bankrupt enterprise that causes great harm and must be held accountable. Here you can see my speech at last year's protest in San Francisco.

The recent furore surrounding publication of the new DSM has provided a much-needed opportunity to discuss and debate crucial issues about how we make sense of, and respond to, experiences of madness and distress. Many psychiatrists, psychologists and other mental health professionals have expressed their dismay about the dominance and inadequacy of a biomedical model of mental illness. Whilst we share these concerns, welcome these debates and support colleagues that are willing to take a stand, The Hearing Voices Network believes that people with lived experience of diagnosis must be at the heart of any discussions about alternatives to the current system.

The therapy industry has aided and abetted the rejection of anger our society is hell-bent on, and made it astoundingly difficult to know what healthy anger looks like. I clawed myself apart trying to “heal” from all this anger, which compounded with every failure to dispel the anger until I was basically a human-shaped sack of rage.

In the current issue of the journal Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry, Australian dissident psychiatrist Niall McLaren titles his article, “Psychiatry as Bullshit” and makes a case for just that. The great controversies in psychiatry are no longer about its chemical-imbalance theory of mental illness or its DSM diagnostic system, both of which have now been declared invalid even by the pillars of the psychiatry establishment. The great controversy today has now become just how psychiatry can be most fairly characterized given its record of being proven wrong about virtually all of its assertions, most notably about its classifications of behaviors, theories of “mental illness,” and treatment effectiveness/adverse effects.

The Scottish Anthropologist Ioan Lewis, wrote the book Ecstatic Religion in 1971, in which he suggested a ‘shaman is not less than a psychiatrist, he is more.’   He claimed psychiatry was just one of the functions of the shaman, and he invited comparison between shamans and psychiatrists.  Some diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia appeared rather similar to the desired conditions of shamans in an altered state of consciousness.  Other terms used (and misused) for therapeutic practitioners included: native or traditional healer, medicine man, witch doctor, soul doctor, sorcerer, magician, spirit medium, exorcist, curer, diviner and diagnostician.

The Defense Cascade is a survival framework that evolutionary researchers are exploring as an explanation for extreme states that many people experience. It can help explain why chronic stress can make us feel like ending our life is the only reasonable way out.

I have long been concerned with the way society responds to people who come back from war. Veterans are routinely funneled into psychiatry’s grasp. Over the decades, some people who fought in wars have shared with me their experiences of being psychiatrized upon return from war. Sometimes these experiences included veterans being stripped of their second amendment rights, and a host of other constitutional, civil, and human rights violations as they began to be forced into complying with psychiatric regimens, and on several occasions this included veterans being subjected to electroshock.

E. Fuller Torrey is one of the strongest proponents of outpatient commitment — the process of mandating individuals to take psychiatric drugs for extended periods of time after being released from a hospital setting. He accuses Robert Whitaker of ignoring the plight of the homeless “mentally ill” who he believes would be better served by the modern mental health system and forced psychiatric drug treatment. Recently, Representative Tim Murphy introduced legislation that would sharply increase outpatient mandatory treatment. Let's take a look at how those who are homeless and suffering severe emotional distress are generally treated in the community, and the reasons they may resist the "treatments" that this legislation would force them to submit to.

Just how sad is our current state of affairs that it causes so much of the population to feel depressed and/or anxious? Just how much are these drugs changing the state of our society as a whole? Are the drugs desensitizing the population to the point that it will tolerate social conditions it would otherwise find intolerable?

Therapists tend to view guilt as a toxic emotion. They are often over-sensitized to the psychological effects of too much guilt—of unwarranted guilt—yet often under-sensitized to the interpersonal effects of someone having too little guilt—the absence of guilt when it is warranted. Guilt is one of the primary social emotions that keeps people socially aware.

Shouting out “I am mentally ill and I am not dangerous” creates the same incomprehension as blaming ‘mental illness’ in the first place. This would be a perfect opportunity for all those people diagnosed with ‘mental illness’ to stand up and say loud and clear: “It isn’t mental and it isn’t an illness.”

I have spent much of the past few years compiling and editing Resistance Matters: An Antipsychiatry Activist Speaks Out, which will document the long and rich activist career of Don Weitz, the grandpappy of Canadian antipsychiatry. Before I met Don in 1986, I thought I was the only person in the world who didn’t believe in “schizophrenia” (with which I had been diagnosed), and who realized that psychiatry was completely bogus.

The screening test for depression recommended by the WHO is so poor that for every 100 screened, 36 will get a false diagnosis of depression.

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.

One cannot be with other individuals without encountering their belief systems at some point. My work with individuals in locked in patient units, mental health clinics and the Los Angeles Jails has brought me into close contact with people who had diverse belief systems, some of which were cultural and life-long, others were trauma-induced or influenced by drugs and alcohol. These experiences taught me to approach belief systems without prejudice and with open receptivity to their meaning and importance to the person.

With the current focus on the possible contribution of psychoactive drugs to the crash of GermanWings flight A320 on Tuesday, March 24, it is useful to identify potential links between the effect of the antidepressants and the events.  In all 47 cases listed on SSRIstories, the pilots were taking antidepressant medications, mostly SSRIs, often in combination with other medications and sometimes with alcohol.

As I walked alone up the stairs to the Rayburn House Office Building this morning to attend the hearing of the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health on H.R. 3717 - the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act - I thought about how I wasn’t truly alone. In spirit with me were all the people who had experienced scary, coercive, and dehumanizing interventions in the name of help. In spirit with me was every mental health provider who went into the field hoping to really make a difference in their communities, but became cynical and discouraged in the face of so many broken systems and broken spirits.

A former pharma executive has broken ranks with the industry in a new book by reporting how multiple psychiatrists, schools, and his desperate hopes pressed him to allow higher and higher doses of antipsychotic medications. The result: his 15-year-old son's death from Seroquel.