Blogs

A year ago today, our youngest child died, thanks to the adversarial actions and toxic treatments foisted on her by medical-model psychiatry. By telling her story, we hope to promote systemic change.

Clinical psychologist, researcher, and professor Jaakko Seikkula, along with Markku Sutela, created the Open Dialogue approach to acute crises in Finland.

A psychiatrist and mom reflects on teen suicide clusters in Palo Alto and discusses alternative ways to address adolescent mental health.

Psychology has greatly broadened its scope since Nietzsche’s day and yet his implied criticism is one the discipline is still wrestling with.

How do Western-trained Muslim therapists work with clients that believe they are possessed? How do they balance their belief in Jinn with their knowledge of psychological/sociological theory? How do they formulate and work with a client in the British context?

The fuzzy concept of neurodivergence has expanded to include almost every human experience, plus its opposite.

It seems one mostly needs to already know what they’re looking for in order to find the most established criticisms of this particular organization. And even with knowledge and intent, it can require some fairly persistent Googling efforts to unearth all there is to be found.

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.

There is not one movement but many, and the language people use reflects how accepting they are of the psychiatric explanation of their experiences.

Assessing the validity of psychiatric twin research is important because it relates to the question of whether the main causes of psychological distress and dysfunction are located inside of the human body and brain, as mainstream psychiatry claims, or outside of the body and brain, as many critics argue.

Researchers have consistently found increasing psychiatric services associated with higher suicide rates.

Our response to this moment should be understanding our shared queer/Mad history and solidarity across lines of oppression.

If I thought that it was possible, I would have opened a string of clinics all over the country to help get people off of antidepressants.  Unfortunately, the problems that sometimes occur when people try to stop an SSRI antidepressant are much more severe and long-lasting than the medical profession acknowledges, and there is no antidote to these problems. The truth is, giving people information about taking antidepressants is like giving information to people who are enroute to a casino; they go because they hear that some people win (at least for a time), but the losers are the ones who ultimately pay for it all — and the odds are not in their favor.

From Socrates to Jesus to Nietzsche, all experienced divine Beatific Visions, just as I have.

Testimony submitted to the Connecticut state legislature in opposition to a bill expanding forced ECT.

Indigenous cultures around the world recognize and intentionally cultivate waking dreams for both personal and community well-being.

The Psychological Injury model will triumph, not just because literally thousands of studies show how trauma and stressful life events result in mental health problems, but because at our core, we know it is true. People hurt people, and people heal people. This cracks the intellectual foundation of psychopharmacology.

I’d like to share a bit about what happened to me after being placed on these medications, and how I successfully got off. Until recently, I was embarrassed to talk about my personal experiences publicly, as I’m a professional who specializes in anxiety and depression. Today, medication free, I feel better than ever before, and I am now on a mission to help my current clients get off medications, and to inform others through my writing about the dangers and pitfalls of starting antidepressants.

In Psychiatric Hegemony: A Marxist Theory of Mental Illness, Bruce Cohen explains the expanding power and influence of psychiatry in terms of its usefulness to the capitalist system — the more useful it is, the more power it is given, and the greater its power, the more useful it becomes.

The Minnesota Starvation Experiment was conducted at the University of Minnesota during the Second World War. Prolonged semi-starvation produced significant increases in depression, hysteria and hypochondriasis, and most participants experienced periods of severe emotional distress and depression and grew increasingly irritable. It really should not be a surprise to this audience that the brain’s functioning is highly compromised when the body is being starved of food (and nutrients). What we wonder is whether eating a diet of primarily highly processed foods low in nutrients has similar effects.

Promoters of "neurodiversity" replace existing forms of oppression with new "neuro" versions that still decontextualise our struggles.

Psychiatry is akin to the outdated and unhelpful way that industry used to understand the assembly line.

Labeling kids with “brain diseases” sets them up for failure. This explains why the U.S. has so many youth crises.

Tapering strips are one of the practical tools mentioned in the new Maudsley Guidance.

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