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I began reaching out to other psychiatric survivors, asking whether they would like to have their art featured in a book, and the response I received was amazing. People openly shared not only their art but their personal stories, their feelings, and their painful journeys into, through, and out of psychiatry.

What exactly does “antipsychiatry” mean? Is the term useful or hopelessly ambiguous? Can one be antipsychiatry without being abolitionist? And if one wants to end the use of psychiatric coercion only, does that position qualify as antipsychiatry?

A good relationship can begin to puncture a hole through the wall of disconnection. The goal is to help a person break out of the isolation and private world that trauma has created and re-engage with a public world—culturally, emotionally and in a way that has personal meaning.

It’s a Saturday afternoon in mid-June and there’s about 150 of us on the ground floor of a low income housing building on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The Institute for the Development of Human Arts is holding their founding event: “Making New Meaning: A School for Innovative Voices & Visions.”

Yet again I find myself in the painful, ridiculous and uncomfortable position of having to try to do my best to repair the extensive damage which is being done to vulnerable survivors of child abuse by the system. Yet again I am powerless to do much about it.

The bot was created by one Danny Freed, inspired by the suicide of his close friend a few years prior. Danny reportedly balks at calling Joy a ‘bot,’ and refers to it instead as a “mental health journaling service.” Joy operates through Facebook’s system and auto-chats you at least once a day to check in.

You might ask, “But why are dreams so crucial to psychiatry?” I would tell you that they are the forgotten language of the psyche, composed of metaphor and symbol, simile and synecdoche. All who enter the world of non-consensus reality long for a physician trained to hear the patois of image.

Something is lost, a great deal is lost, when we give up an independent advocacy platform about our own bodies and subsume our needs and rights into what medical professionals are motivated to fight for on our behalf.

We need to talk and act on our common dreams for people who are dealing with major mental health challenges. And we need to recognize that we have all been vulnerable to a retreat into extreme views from our respective traumas, to some degree.

Is madness good for something? If there is something positive about psychosis, then perhaps what we really need is a balanced view, somewhere between “romanticizing” it as being all good and “awfulizing” it as being all bad.

For persons with psychosocial disabilities, one of the most fundamental rights laid out in the CRPD is the right to equal recognition before the law and legal capacity (Article 12). Our latest Position Paper focuses on Article 12 of the CRPD.

Those of us who are radicals are commonly struggling to find ways to confer legitimacy on positions which substantially challenge an oppressive status quo. In this article, I will be exploring how to accomplish such feats successfully.

Many mental health advocates promote ending a perceived stigma surrounding treatment. I wonder if a Mental Health Awareness Month campaign in 1940 would have led to greater humanization of mentally ill people, or if it would have just paved the way for more lobotomies?

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.

This proposed legislation would require practitioners to obtain written informed consent regarding risk of dependency and addiction and risks associated with long-term use. It would also mandate warning labels concerning long-term use.

The studies that the FDA relied upon for adults over age 24 were dismally flawed and untrustworthy compared to the ones used for children. The child studies showed that antidepressants can cause suicidality — the adult studies showed nothing other than FDA collusion with drug companies.

On May 17, 2017, we learned that Chris Cornell of Soundgarden had reportedly committed suicide by hanging. Perhaps an “addict turned psychiatric patient,” like so many, Chris Cornell seemed to have left the frying pan of substance abuse for the fire of psychiatric medication risks.

The controversy with 13RW is essentially a clashing of worlds — the world of entertainment (and its predominant audience of teens) and the world of science and practice. Who’s to say those from each perspective cannot find common ground in the service of something with life and death consequences?

We are told a story about illness, and that story serves a mindset that underlies the darkness that we feel all around us and within us. The mindset is that we are flesh robots, floating on a dead rock, in the middle of nowhere. But we are in the midst of a paradigm shift.

Dainius Pūras, UN Special Rapporteur on Health, has issued a groundbreaking new report critiquing biopsychiatry and its reliance on coercion, yet he pulls his punches, most unforgivably by treating the obligation to end coercive practices as a matter for gradual rather than immediate implementation.

There are few around Mad in America territory who would argue against the dangers of the National Alliance for Mental Illness. But as a movement, we often fail to recognize the dangers of their much younger sibling named ‘Autism Speaks’.

In this passage Oliver Sacks writes about an altered state in which the capacity of the smell sense opens up. That is what it’s like for me all the time — hypersensitivity. I have this sort of acute capacity with all my senses all the time… it’s overwhelming, and it’s also the source of all my healing.

Rogue psychiatrists are straying from orthodoxy by expressing the belief that people who are burdened by excessive loss or difficulties are understandably depressed, and therefore not "diagnosable," but Dr. Ghaemi is bringing them back to the fold in the fine tradition of psychiatric pedagogy.

For our Haggadah, the reading material that guides the Seder activities, we included a list of the 10 modern plagues: psychiatric incarceration, forced drugging, electroshock therapy, restraint, seclusion, coercive behavior therapies, outpatient commitment, the pathology paradigm, sanism, and societal coercion to recover.

The jury was out for days. And when they came back it became clear they were wrestling with the issue of who to blame. This was like playing Go, where it can look like the black counters on the board have white encircled until white puts down one more piece and all of a sudden it wins.