Blogs

Sami Timimi explores the common factors that influence therapy’s success, the evidence base for psychotherapy, and the over-promotion of CBT.

Never in human history did a powerful institution, no matter how harmful and corrupt, slide into self-inflicted irrelevancy. Institutions like the current psychiatric system can only be toppled by a powerful social movement.

Neoliberalism teaches people that suffering has nothing to do with the inequality they experience, but that it comes from their own individual failures of body and mind, and requires "experts" to identify and treat it.

Continuing the series, we look at discussions of "chemical imbalances," medications, and diagnoses, as well as telling people to "calm down" and a further look at the "observer."

Your diagnosis should serve YOU. Not your parents, your doctors, your teachers, or the next door neighbor. We should be fighting for a future where the person being labeled has the ultimate say over how doctors and therapists view them.

Jill deserves all the defense she is receiving. However, this rush to defend Jill’s honorific usage is missing a much bigger and far more pervasive point: NO ONE should be called “Dr. Last-name.”

The promotion of SSRI antidepressant use began with the pharmaceutical industry and occurs despite evidence that these drugs are harmful, not helpful, in children and adolescents.

“My life was very, very good.” That’s how Michael sums up how things were for him—prior to his suffering from devastating withdrawal effects after discontinuing GlaxoSmithKline’s blockbuster drug Paxil.

Suffering is a universal human condition. But without making meaning of suffering, it can overwhelm us. Finding meaning in suffering might help to find the will to survive when life is difficult.

The medicalisation of our emotional lives has led to a horrific cultural shift in which we, and our children, have become alienated from and suspicious of our emotions, chipping away at our natural resilience.

Autism is an umbrella diagnosis at this point. The broadness of the diagnosis doesn’t tend to be useful to clinicians. But it is very useful to the individuals who live with it.

Our new discussion series aims to explore what we do and don’t know about safe withdrawal from antidepressants, antipsychotics, benzodiazepines and stimulants.

Now that the novelty has worn off and we are able to step back and analyze the situation, what does the switch to teletherapy portend for our profession?

The FDA has finally acknowledged the adverse effects of benzodiazepines, the dangers of withdrawal, and that the current packaging does not sufficiently warn of these harms.

No one has come near to finding a genetic basis or a characteristic neurological abnormality for autism, and as a result there is no biological marker or brain scan used to diagnose ASD.

The theatre of the oppressed directly challenges societal problems of oppression. Here the involved learn much from the enactment—concrete possible solutions and possible practices of resistance.

What worked for participants is the compassionate, welcoming, inclusive and non-judgmental approach of DDA. It is about peer support, role modelling, hope, building skills… acquiring self-confidence and building a new identity.

Because the “scientists” who study, categorise, and establish guidelines for autism can’t find anything definitive, they resort to scientism. Over time, it becomes part of our cultural “common sense.”

An analysis of the National Association of Social Workers Code of Ethics’ regulations on dual relationships: Indications for self-disclosure and problematic consequences for peers entering the social work workforce.

It’s common that both people are contributing to the issue in one way or another. However, there is at least one instance that renders “it takes two” unavailable for blanket-statement use, and that is abuse.

Sami Timimi discusses the lack of findings for a genetic or neurobiological basis for ADHD, and explores the short- and long-term effects of stimulant drugs.

I trained in psychiatry in the 1950s. I saw psychiatry switch from trying to help patients to understand themselves better to trying to find a drug that would relieve their symptoms.

Both the idea that there are some characteristic brain-based abnormalities for those diagnosed with ADHD, and that the medications used have specific properties that target a disease process—like a chemical imbalance—are false.

An interview between Drs. Aftab and Pies reveals a deep mistrust of patients' reports of their own experiences, and devolves into a game of semantics in an attempt to prove psychiatry's relevance.

It is hard to step out of the space of diagnoses because of the power it holds. The “doctor” who inflicted on you the awful label of “schizophrenia” or “bipolar” damages you because of the power he holds.