Blogs

Essays by a diverse group of writers, in the United States and abroad, engaged in rethinking psychiatry. (The directory of personal stories can be found here, and initiatives here).

Review: “(Mis)Diagnosed: How Bias Distorts Our Perception of Mental Health”

7
Psychiatric diagnoses can be shaped by prejudice, reflecting biases that ignore trauma, diminish populations, and invalidate humanity and experience.
Photo of Don Weitz

Remembering Don Weitz, 1930-2021

9
My hero, mentor, and very dear friend Don Weitz died comfortably, in his home, on the afternoon of September 1, attended by his loving twin children, Lisa and Mark.
Photograph of man's lower face with a pill on his tongue

Psychedelics—The New Psychiatric Craze

39
Psychedelics have become popular through the potent mixture of financial interests and desperation. Evidence for their beneficial effects is lacking.

Interview: Moving Toward a Human Rights Approach to Student Mental Health

1
Psychologist Jim Probert of the University of Florida's student counseling center explains why "Our goal is not to take the steering wheel out of the person's hands."
Woman trapped in a glass

The Sins of Conservatorship: Why Britney Spears Compared It to Slavery

15
For the last three years of my mother’s life, she was under absolute control of her conservator. If we dared to object to the neglect or abuse, retaliation was certain.
Roxanne Stewart-Johnson and her children

The Great Triumph of Roxanne Stewart-Johnson: Psychiatric Refugee

9
Roxanne fled to Canada, and received formal refugee status, as a psychiatric refugee after being threatened with psychiatric imprisonment and forced drugging in Jamaica.

The Case of Joshua Spriestersbach: If This Is a Horror Story, What Does it...

14
Spriestersbach was imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital for almost three years. The more he told the doctors that he was not Thomas Castleberry, the more they believed that he was psychotic.

Garbage in, Garbage out: The Newest Cochrane Meta-Analysis of Depression Pills in Children

32
In May 2021, Cochrane published a network meta-analysis of depression pills for children. The abstract is misleading and reads like drug company marketing.

ISEPP to American Psychological Association: Condemn Forced Treatment

0
The International Society for Ethical Psychology and Psychiatry petitions the American Psychological Association to condemn forced treatment as a human rights violation
Illustration of a head filling up with pills

Psychiatry Is the Cause, Not the Solution

42
I have found that trauma is frequently at the root of many eventual psychological and medical issues. Medications often only worsen the disconnection caused by trauma.

Mental Health Survival Kit, Chapter 5 (Part 6): Patient Stories and Conclusion

23
In an evidence-based healthcare system, we should not use interventions that do more harm than good, but that's just what psychiatry does.

An American History of Addiction, Part 8: A Turning Point, But Where Do We...

3
Practitioners and researchers have increasingly started to feel that the maintenance of the status quo has left the addiction field in a state of conflict and fluctuation.
UK street in winter

How I Learned the Social and Environmental Causes of Madness

2
My first encounter with mental illness was when I was 17. My friend was hospitalised in the psychiatric unit of the local general hospital and diagnosed with hypomania.

Speak Out! Britney’s Fight Is Our Fight

17
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.
Businesswoman hand trying to stop toppling dominoes on table

Mental Health Survival Kit, Chapter 5: Survival Kit for Young Psychiatrists in a Sick...

4
Peter Gøtzsche describes trying to join the psychiatric establishment to bring attention to critical issues from the inside.
3d illustration of a brain with one end red and shattering

Psychiatric Drugs “Help” By Causing Brain Dysfunction

25
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.

In Memoriam: Paula Joan Caplan

15
Paula Caplan, known for her fierce criticism of psychiatry and its diagnostic manual, died Wednesday at age 74.

Mental Health Survival Kit, Chapter 5: Survival Kit for Young Psychiatrists in a Sick...

19
Peter Gøtzsche explains how psychiatry has reacted when confronted with evidence and stories of lived experience, and how this has corrupted journalism.

Psychiatric Drugs Increase Suicide. CAMPP’s Film “Prescripticide” Exposes the Harms

30
“Prescripticide”: The purpose of this informational video is to raise public awareness of this association between psychiatric drugs and violence/suicide.

Discomfort Is the New Comfort Zone

16
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.

Mental Health Survival Kit, Chapter 5: Survival Kit for Young Psychiatrists in a Sick...

15
Peter Gøtzsche explains how newspapers and film festivals censor the work of journalists and filmmakers in order to appease the pharmaceutical industry.

How Do We Know When a Treatment Works? A Primer on the Scientific Method

25
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.

Britney: In the Name of Health

3
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."

Flying Over Australia’s Cuckoo’s Nest: A Review of “Overprescribing Madness”

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

Mental Health Survival Kit, Chapter 5: Survival Kit for Young Psychiatrists in a Sick...

5
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.