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“The substantial hereditary component in schizophrenia,” a pair of researchers wrote in 1993, “is surely one of the two or three best-established facts in psychiatry.” But is it really? For mainstream psychiatry and psychiatric genetics, schizophrenia is “a severe mental disorder with a lifetime risk of about 1%, characterized by hallucinations, delusions and cognitive deficits, with heritability estimated at up to 80%,” or a “highly heritable neuropsychiatric disorder of complex genetic etiology.” Many commentators have challenged these claims, and some have challenged the concept of schizophrenia itself.

Our priorities for studying and improving "mental health" are way out of whack. They have been for a long time. For the past 30 years, the National Institute for Mental Health has been spending most of its gigantic budget ($1.3 billion in 2015) on studying the brain and looking for the genes that cause "mental illness." That's been a tremendous waste of money, time and effort.

On January 7, 2016 my newly 13-year-old son (he helped me fashion the title for this blog!) brought home two permission slips from the middle school where he is currently (hopefully) making his way through the 7th grade. One of the slips was for a class trip to the Bronx Zoo. Okay, fine. However, the other asked me to give my okay for him to participate in a “Signs of Suicide” (SOS) curriculum and the perhaps-too-honestly-named ‘Brief Screening for Adolescent Depression’ (BSAD) that accompanies it. (Does no one else see the perverse humor in a depression screener that seems to actually be encouraging those screened to “be sad”?)

This week we launched PeerRespite.net, a website dedicated to information and resources regarding peer respites in the U.S. As part of the initiative, recruitment is open for the 2015 Peer Respites Essential Features Survey.

Let us put the final nail in the coffin of the neurotransmitter myth of big Pharma and the APA. The idea that psychiatric issues come from some quantitative soup of neurotransmitters in the synapses of the brain is completely wrong. Yes there are neurotransmitters in the brain. However, serotonin does not create symptoms.

Mental health policy does not sound exciting. It is - you’ll just have to take my word for it-, but even if you don’t, you might agree with me that it’s crucial. Mental health policy shapes mental health legislation, and mental health legislation shapes issues such as consent, access, equal opportunities and de-institutionalisation, to name but a few. Influencing policy is key to reframing the debate around mental health, and changing the reality on the ground for people with lived experience. With this in mind, here is an introduction to Mental Health Europe’s work on the revisions to ICD 10, and a call to action, for you to get directly involved in this international debate.

Revealing the false information provided about psychiatry should cause any thinking person, patient, thought-leader or politician to wonder: “how many otherwise normal or potentially curable people over the last half century of psych drug propaganda have actually been mis-labeled as mentally ill (and then mis-treated) and sent down the convoluted path of therapeutic misadventures – heading toward oblivion?”

At the Center for Family, Community & Social Justice, Inc. we have made every effort to implement a "Just Therapy Practice" that reflects the decision to serve children, adolescents and their families and communities in oppressed urban areas according to principles underlying the “relational perspective paradigm” rather than the “objective realism paradigm.” It takes some time for us to appreciate that the adoption of a design of thinking oriented by a relational and contextual perspective also opens new vistas and perspectives for personal and professional encounters and work.

This means that what ADHD proponents present as validation of a diagnosis of a real and treatable disorder is in fact a placebo effect caused by an ostensibly scientific label, which exists in synergy with an efficient, legal drug. The ADHD label produces this placebo effect because its diagnosis is based on behavior that in reality could be observed by anyone. What is observed sounds "scientific"; it is easily understandable and highly obvious. When the diagnosis is turned into an action plan, we forget that there is nothing scientific about it and that its evaluation is purely subjective and clinical; that it creates a great many false positives, and that a drug prescribed in half of the cases indeed does have serious side effects.

I want to tell you about a magical tool I use particularly for navigating challenging situations. It's called Non violent communication (NVC). It's a way of understanding and communicating that I've found particularly useful in situations of conflict. I've hyped it up in the first sentence as a magical tool but like all useful things, it's got its limitations too. I guess the key is how and when to use it. So what am I talking about?

While I found the recent study, "Weighing the Evidence for Harm from Long-Term Treatment with Antipsychotic Medications," to be a valuable contribution to our understand of the role of long-term use of neuroleptic drugs, I continue to struggle with some of the implications for clinical work.

My doctor insisted that my symptoms could not be associated with withdrawal – they had to be symptoms of an underlying condition. I have since learned from legitimate sources that protracted withdrawal syndrome from benzodiazepines can intensify long before it abates, with some symptoms lasting for years.

The question ‘why do people hear voices?’ tends to rise up after we’ve offered challenges to medicalized perspectives. Most often, this question does not come from people who hear voices themselves, but from people in provider roles, and – with the greatest frequency – from parents. As a parent myself, I understand the desperation to make things ‘okay’ for one's child. I can empathize deeply with the sense of fight and the search for answers. But what if it’s the wrong question entirely? What if focusing in on ‘why’ actually pulls us further and further away from the ‘helping’ that we most aim to find?

The following sermon, delivered on the first Sunday of 2016 at the Unitarian Church of Vancouver, explores the principles and practices of book repair — values and techniques that may resonate deeply with the readers of Mad in America. Can we approach another body, and our own, with the consideration and respect a book conservator uses to approach a distressed book?

Any attempt to establish an alternative diagnostic system to the predominantly biologic DSM-5 classifications or to initiate a transformation of the individually oriented mental health treatment systems needs to critically explore how, not only what, we think about health and healing, about mental and emotional suffering, about traumatic experiences and injustices, and the multiple forms of pain that are part of our human existence. The broad critique of the DSM-5 by so many national and international organizations and individual colleagues will in the end not be powerful and far reaching enough without this inquiry into the foundations of our thinking and without reflection about our ways of thinking.

By Ana Keck, Afiya The person who answered your call to stay at Afiya could have been me. When I answer the phone at the respite, I often find myself wondering what the caller thinks of me. When I called to stay at Afiya myself, I had a quite radically different vision of what the person on the other end of the phone was like. I pictured someone very much in charge, with their life together, who maybe had some hard times years ago. Now being on the other side of the phone, I can tell you I have not reached some recovery nirvana. I don’t actually want to get there, because I personally don’t think it exists. I could be in the midst of a variety of hard or wonderful or transformative life experiences right now. I just happen to have the emotional space to support other people, too, and so here I am at work today.

On January 5, 2016, President Obama held a press conference in which he perpetuated the myth that there is a link between mental health conditions and gun violence. In response, the Campaign for Real Change in Mental Health Policy went into action, calling for people to “Tell the White House to Stop Scapegoating People with Psychiatric Diagnoses!” At the same time, the Campaign is circulating its petition, addressed to the U.S. House of Representatives, asking them to “Vote Against The Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act (H.R. 2646).”

On December 29, 2015, the FDA proposed reclassifying ECT, essentially approving of its routine clinical use. I submitted a statement to FDA, explaining why the FDA should ban ECT until it goes through rigorous testing. I urge others to respond quickly to the FDA’s call for comments.

For three days in December, I was fortunate enough to attend the Hearing Voices Facilitator Training held in Portland, OR. This training expanded my understanding of the voice hearing experience and equipped me with a number of tools to use in facilitating hearing voices support groups. Grounded in a feeling of community, the training was dynamic, emotionally therapeutic, and educational all at the same time – a crystal clear example of how support groups themselves might manifest in the lives of their members.

In the September, 2015 issue of JAMA Psychiatry, a team of Swedish researchers published a study evaluating the serotonin system in persons with social anxiety. the findings here are in direct contradiction to what the pharmaceutical companies would have us believe: that anxiety and depression are caused by deficit levels of serotonin. There was an editorial by the authors in the same issue which attempted to obfuscate the findings by referencing the heterogeneity in persons who exhibit social anxiety. Unfortunately, neither the article or the editorial referenced the work of neuroscientist who for the past 30 years have been investigating what happens in the brains of animals that are subjected to uncontrollable stress.

On December 25, 2015, renowned psychiatrist Robert Spitzer died. Spitzer was a giant in world psychiatry, best known as the architect of the third edition of the psychiatry’s diagnostic bible — The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) — the edition that effected a turnaround and became the template for how psychiatric diagnosing has proceeded ever after. As such, this death has hardly gone unnoticed, with stories about him proliferating. Most of what is written is highly laudatory. What concerns me is how to understand his “psychiatric contribution” to society.

The beginning of a New Year is always an occasion for looking back at past accomplishments (and failures), and to look ahead too, at what the New Year may bring. And as 2016 opens, it’s clear that MIA has reached a crossroads moment. We can look back and see many accomplishments, and we can look ahead and see many exciting opportunities. But we also have to confront a challenge: we need to figure out how to sustain our operations.

When former NIMH chief Dr. Thomas Insel speaks, people listen. Dr. Insel famously criticized the DSM a couple of years ago for its lack of reliability. He notably broke ranks with the APA by saying there were no bio-markers, blood tests, genetic tests or imaging tests that could verify or establish a DSM diagnosis of schizophrenia, bipolar or schizoaffective disorder. However in a new article he announces research that claims to have found bona-fide physiological markers that identify specific "biotypes" of psychosis. This system could, purportedly, identify a person as possessing a specific biotype of psychosis, instead of a DSM-category diagnosis.

I have made the point many times that the DSM definition of a mental disorder can be accurately paraphrased as: any significant problem of thinking, feeling, and/or behaving. It is important to note that the APA's definition of a mental disorder/illness is entirely arbitrary, in that there is no objective reality to which it must conform. A mental disorder is what the APA says it is, and there is no way to argue that a particular problem is not a mental disorder, because there is no reality against which this kind of labeling can be checked.

Public perception of mental health stigma does not entirely reflect a reality that exists. Many of you reading this that have experienced truly negative reactions from others (due to mental health concerns and/or treatment) may be angered or offended by this proposition. However, no one (especially myself) is saying that stigma is not a serious concern that doesn’t need to be addressed. It is. Although in some ways I do feel that people can seek out treatment with less apprehension today than decades ago, there is no doubt that many still experience negative reactions (intentionally or unintentionally) from what others perceive in them.