“You Need to Know Your Value”: Shame and the Fee in Psychoanalytic Socialization
My focus on the fee makes tangible the powerful role of shame in shaping clinicians' attitudes toward the practical business of psychotherapy.
Psychodynamics in the Red (or How I Went Broke in Therapy)
Frankly, I was hoping therapy would cost me less. In the end, it would cost me almost everything I had.
Use of the Self: Class Politics and Liberatory Potentials of Containment and Enactment...
Enactments, we learned, were bound to occasionally occur and typically required processing and remedy.
Class Notes from the Consulting Room
Capitalist realism: whatever the downsides, we’re trained to believe this is the best system we’ve got.
What Psychoanalytic Clinicians Can Learn From John Womack’s “Grubbing Analysis”
Finding the place to make an intervention that builds towards a change in the balance of power in the sector we work in.
The Rate of Exchange
We value what we pay for, you reason, but you will slide your scale for me. And so, we begin our work together. The talking cure.
There’s No Escape From the World
There’s always an economic transaction underneath. When the business stops working out, the therapy is apt to end.
Evoking Discomfort: Expressive Writing on Money, Class, and Psychoanalysis
Therapists seem to be doing a massive amount of mental gymnastics to rationalize professional practices that are financially motivated.
Eating Disorders: Where Madness Meets Medicalization
While there is overwhelming focus on the psychological side of ED healthcare, there is still an enormous gap in the physical side of it.
The Healing Powers of Nature
For folks who struggle to fully trust, or attach, to a therapist, forming an attachment with nature can be revelatory.
Lemmings Don’t; Humans Do
Being depressed is not your fault, but part of buying into an insane society. You do not have a “chemical imbalance” but are responding to your world.
My PTSD Is Mine Only
Trauma doesn’t submit to categories. It doesn’t fit criteria. It is wild. It is intimate. It is always, always personal.
Facing the Truth About World Mental Health Day
Big Pharma has quietly sponsored World Mental Health Day campaigns, shaping global mental health policy.
DSM: Improve, Trash, Replace, or None of the Above?
Most clinicians are well aware that many diagnoses are vague, not specific, and don’t point to a treatment that works.
An Open Letter to Those I Love Whose Neurotypical Privilege Keeps Them from Seeing...
The next time you see someone who is unhoused, have some compassion.
“How Are You?” The Strangest Question to ask in a Psychiatric Hospital
Inside a psychiatric hospital, the social script doesn’t fit the situation. The location itself undermines the premise.
Peer Advocates Who Made Things Happen in Oregon
We must keep the histories of peer advocates alive, lest they be forgotten for their part in making the recovery model a vision for system change.
Counter Archiving “Mental Health Records”
Standing in front of the mirror, i wonder, “what outfit should i wear for scanning my psychiatric records at the local library?”
The Vanity Fair of Magic Potions
When someone is searching for medicine, there will always be someone else ready to sell them the “cure."
“I Can’t Remember a Single Day”: New Survey Shows Disastrous Memory Effects of ECT
114 people told us they lost vital memories like getting married, birthdays, and family events.
Green Party of California: Forced Treatment Must Be Abolished
In a public statement, the Green Party of California endorsed the Abolish Forced Psychiatry statement.
The Importance of Grief—in the Psychological Process and in Our Lives
In order to mature and to process our pain—things that are unavoidable in our lives—it is necessary to confront this grief.
Individualized Understandings of Mental Health Mislead Us
Diagnosis separates the person from their world and detaches their pain from their circumstances.
How Not to Diagnose Your Child
The reflections of a mental health professional on saving her own son from invalid and harmful labels.
Like a Refuge and Like a Prison
From Mad in Puerto Rico: Laura López-Aybar interviews Francisco about psychiatric hospitalization.
