Blogs

The National Council on Independent Living (NCIL) supports both Disability Pride Month and Mad Pride Month: Both are July!”

We are pleased to announce that Charmaine Harris, who is a part of the POD team, will join the peer-supported Open Dialogue panel on Wednesday as a co-host.

Despite the hype, the IAPT is hardly “world-beating.” In fact, it is a doubtful model for other countries to follow. Over half of IAPT clients don’t even attend two sessions.

“Easier access” to mental health treatment is likely to translate to getting more kids in front of more prescribers to produce more lifetime customers.

Some of us have survived violent, coercive forms of socially condoned mental health treatments. But many of us grow past the pain, into healing and compassion.

Cargo Cult Psychiatry uses the courts to force people, who are otherwise assumed to have the right to refuse treatment, to submit to their pseudoscientific approach to "mental health."

Getting support from other psychiatrized people, outside of the system, has the potential to be mutual. You are not being “treated” or talked down to. The contact is genuine and natural.

No one is safe from psychiatry’s project of medicalizing every variation of human emotion and behaviour, especially people viewed with suspicion and contempt by the powerful.

Despite the well-documented greater effectiveness of behavior therapy, psychiatry's choice of treatment for mental disorder heavily favors drugs.

The beginning of healing from trauma requires stripping power away from disconnecting violators like psychiatry's medical model.

Bergner’s piece in The New York Times challenged the illusions of psychiatry. That made some people angry, outraged, or scared. The result is their comments section.

The Lancet seminar is one of the most misleading articles about suicide I have ever seen. Depression pills double the risk of suicide in children and adolescents.

Mark Lipman made the album he wished his 23-year-old self would have heard. He needed a way to tell an integrated story instead of one of stigma and diagnosis, and here it was in music.

The problems related to the use of antidepressants cannot be solved by an oversimplified psychiatry brainwashed by the pharmaceutical industry.

The risk of undergoing shock treatment remains. As the FDA warns, “The long-term safety and effectiveness of ECT treatment has not been demonstrated.”

The psychiatric solution and the psychological solution to psychopathology are fundamentally incompatible with each other.

Researchers could be doing a better job of defining peer support. We could also have a better understanding of what the “positive effects'' of peer support really are.

The new NICE depression guideline is a reflection of the field: you don’t really know what you’re doing, and you lack confidence that it’s doing any good.

The online conference Withdrawal From Psychiatric Drugs was held on Friday May 6th and 7th. Here we summarize each of the speakers' points.

Urging aviation students at the summit to seek help if they need it is a noble cause, but it sounds hollow when the FAA regulations are built on stigma.

Since COVID, NISAPI has transitioned our collaborative therapy setting from barns and fields to kitchens and living rooms. Our clients report similar positive outcomes with telehealth as in person.

Meditation, walks in nature, and artistic and musical activities: These all have something in common—they have the power to dissolve the boundaries between us.

I believe "prosumer" is the best term to describe consumers of mental health services who are also traditional professionals in mental health care.

Doctors, drug companies, and the news media have profited from skyrocketing rates of diagnosis and drugging for ADHD, and the law has created a perverse set of incentives for parents and children which favor the ADHD label.

At Inner Fire, people share meals, take walks, clean, and garden, learning how to live again after being disconnected from others, nature, and our authentic selves.