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As part of the effort to stop the down-classification of the shock device, on March 24, 2016, people who are psychiatric survivors, shock survivors, allies, and MindFreedom International members sent a 47-page public complaint to the FDA Ombudsman Office and Medical Devices Ombudsman concerning the FDA's attempts at down-classifying the shock device. Here are some excerpts. Please sign the petition and add your support to our growing strength!

Mad in America readers will not be astonished by the news that Big PhRMA showers physicians with “free” trinkets and samples and lunches and dinners and junkets and dollars. Such tactics are common throughout the world of commerce, where they are described by terms ranging from “promotion” to “commercial bribery.” But do bribe-like actions ensnare physicians?

5.7 million Americans say they have "Bipolar Disorder." These patients have been labeled, categorized, and offered an understanding of themselves as diseased, sick, and permanently broken. It is considered one of the more severe "mental illnesses," perhaps because it presents almost as an amalgamation of psychosis and depression in a particularly volatile form. In my training, I was taught to medicate these patients, often with multiple medications, and often against their will. Poetically, though, these patients — desperate to understand who they are in a system that condemns them to a life of struggle and suffering — will be vindicated by modern science.

On February 22, Allen Frances, MD, published an article titled Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry on the HuffPost Blog.  The general theme of the article is that psychiatry may have some problems, but it is basically sound, wholesome, and necessary. The impression being conveyed here is that psychiatry's abandonment of a biopsychosocial approach and embracing of the brief med-check was the result of "drastic cuts in the funding of the mental health services." This is very misleading. The fact is that psychiatry set its own course when it jumped enthusiastically on the pharma bandwagon, and apart, from a miniscule minority who remained aloof from the drug-pushing, has made no attempt to alight.

As the benzodiazepine crisis spreads throughout the United States and other parts of the world, so does the debate within the benzo victim/survivor community. We know that it can be terribly invalidating to label and treat a person as a “drug addict” who is only physically dependent on benzos — and taking these drugs exactly as prescribed by a doctor. However, it can be equally invalidating to deny that “iatrogenic benzo dependence” intersects in multiple ways in the lives of people struggling with “addiction.” People will ALSO SUFFER when yanked off of their benzos, or forced into similar rapid tapers when a doctor becomes aware of their addiction history. 

Creating Community Solutions, part of the national mental health dialogue project, was started over four years ago to engage the public around mental health. It was based on a concept called deliberative democracy, where people who disagree with each other engage in dialogue to come to different solutions for a problem. However, for many reasons, this particular project only engaged with one part of the community. The chance to hear from the public was completely missed. Here is how that happened.

The March 3^rd, 2016 edition of the Wall Street Journal featured an article by past President of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) Jeffrey Lieberman and his colleague, computational neuroscientist Ogi Ogas. The article was entitled “Genetics and Mental Illness—Let’s Not Get Carried Away.” In their piece, the authors started by expressing the belief that a recent study identified a gene that causes schizophrenia, and then discussed whether it is desirable or possible to remove allegedly pathological genes in the interest of creating a future “mentally perfect society.” The authors of the article, like many previous textbook authors, seem unfamiliar with the questionable “evidence” put forward by psychiatry as proof that its disorders are “highly heritable” In fact, DSM-5 Task Force Chair David Kupfer admitted that “we’re still waiting” for the discovery of “biological and genetic markers” for psychiatric disorders.

The argument that is usually made against involuntary commitment and forced treatment is that these actions, under the authority of a state, violate a person’s basic civil rights. They deprive a person of liberty and personal autonomy, and do so in the absence of a criminal charge. However, there is another argument, one of adjunctive value, that can be made against involuntary commitment and forced treatment. Medical science argues against forced treatment too.

For psychiatric ‘help’ to happen by force is a paradox and makes absolutely no sense. It can destroy people's personality and self-confidence. It can lead, in the long run, to physical and psychological disability. My dear daughter Luise got caught in this ‘helping system’ by mistake, but she didn't make it out alive. I'm sad to say I later discovered that the way Luise was treated was more the rule than the exception.

On February 24th, 2016 Bill HD4554 - An Act relative to benzodiazepines and non-benzodiazepine hypnotics was filed by Representative Paul McMurtry in the Massachusetts State House. The bill received 47 co-sponsors during the seven-day open period in which legislators can co-sponsor. This is an impressive and promising turnout.

Over the past two months, Ronald Pies and Allen Frances, in response to a post I had written, wrote several blogs that were meant to serve as an “evidence-based” defense of the long-term use of antipsychotics. As I read their pieces, I initially focused on that core argument they were presenting, but second time through, the aha moment arrived for me. Their blogs, when carefully parsed, make a compelling case that their profession, in their use of antipsychotics as a treatment for multiple psychotic disorders, has done great harm, and continues to do so today.

When I was born, everyone was expecting me to have arms. The doctor's mind raced; how am I going to tell this mother and the father that their son has hands but not arms? If he's missing so much in his extremities, mustn’t he also be missing a mind? My mom looked into my eyes and knew - in a way that only mothers know - that I had a mind, and spirit.

In the past five years, there has been a dramatic explosion of interest in the Open Dialogue Therapy practiced in Tornio, Finland. It is a humanistic “treatment” that has produced five-year outcomes for psychotic patients that are, by far, the best in the developed world, and there are now groups in the United States, Europe and beyond that are seeking to “import” this care. However, the challenges for doing so are many and, last month, Open Dialogue UK - on the occasion of the first-ever fully recognized Open Dialogue training outside of Tornio - organized a conference in London to hold an open dialogue about Open Dialogue.

Editors of even mainstream publications know that most of their readers hate TV drug ads, and so that’s why I could get the below piece published on AlterNet and then picked up by Salon. What’s most important to me in this piece—but which I did not “lede” with because I doubt that editors would have run it if I had is that: (1) Abilify was originally a drug for schizophrenia but has become a best-selling drug because it is now advertised as booster medication for antidepressants because antidepressants, as the Abilify commercial tells us, do not work for 2/3 of antidepressant users; and (2) Peter Gotzsche, in his book Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime, and Peter Rost, former vice president of marketing at Pfizer, equate Big Pharma with organized crime and the mob.

Despite the fact that no one in history, not even the omnipotent American Psychiatric Association -- which produces and profits mightily from the "Bible" of mental disorders -- has come up with a halfway good definition of "mental illness," and despite the fact that the process of creating and applying the labels of mental illness is unscientific, any of those labels can be used to deprive the person so labeled of their human rights. This is terrifying. It ought to terrify those who are so labeled and those who are not, because deprivation of human rights on totally arbitrary grounds is inhumane and immoral.

Have you ever tried to do community engagement or join a coalition of people working on mental health stuff? If you have been unhappy doing coalition work or community engagement, they may have said it was you. They may have complained that you were too demanding or too triggered by your trauma issues. But the problem is not on us as advocates. This is a structural problem. How do you keep the disease model people from dominating?

When people are “mad,” they are often insisting that certain things are so, and frequently seem unwilling or incapable of appreciating or learning from other perspectives. Yet when the supposedly “sane” mental health system approaches those who are mad, it typically does the same thing – it insists that its own view of what’s going on is correct, and seems incapable of appreciating or learning from others, whether they be the patient, the family, former users of services, or anyone who understands madness in a different way.

Popular illness narratives tend to be of the restitution sort: I was living my life, I became sick, I got well and picked up where I left off. However, this idea that ill health is a journey to wellness doesn’t help someone with a chronic illness or disability to tell her own story, which may not have a (conventional) happy ending. The notion of ‘recovery’ can be damaging when a return to health may not be possible.

On Tuesday, the FDA entered into a settlement agreement in Amarin Pharma v. U.S. Food & Drug Administration, allowing Amarin to promote a prescription drug for off-label use, so long as its promotion is truthful and non-misleading. The Amarin Settlement seems to be an abandonment by the federal government of protecting the public from off-label prescriptions.  But these settlement were just the cost of doing business for the drug companies, while they continue rake in huge profits from the continued off-label prescribing of drugs, which does not diminish after the settlements. Of course, anything that is false or misleading is still grounds for charges, but that is a far harder case to make. I think the ban against off-label promotion is dead for all practical purposes.  

Rethinking Psychiatry recently hosted a showing of the award-winning film 'Bipolarized.' The film criticizes both the mainstream mental health system and societal standards of masculinity. The author of this post draws parallels to the film and the one-man show "Crimes Against Nature," in which psychology professor Dr. Chris Kilmartin critiques traditional standards of masculinity as harmful and unrealistic.

First, let me tell you that I was once a typical doctor, not to mention a typical American who loved pizza, soda, birth control, and ibuprofen. I believed in the science that I was taught to believe in. I felt that medication was the answer. And that symptoms were problems that needed to be fixed, suppressed, eradicated. That every patient was just one chemical prescription away from functioning “normally.” It wasn’t until my fellowship specialized in medicating pregnant and breastfeeding women, at a time when I was also pregnant, that I began to feel into a voice inside me that said, “I’m writing prescriptions that no amount of reported ‘safety data’ could convince me to take."

The future of mental health interview series continued this past week with interviews with Peter Kinderman, president-elect of the British Psychological Society, on the efforts of the British Psychological Society, Jed Diamond on individual psychotherapy, Ruth Folit on healing through journaling, Shawn Rubin on gender diversity issues, and Marilyn Wedge on reclaiming childhood.

The more acutely and tellingly psychiatry is criticized, the more adamantly it defends its concepts and practices. But it seldom addresses the actual criticisms, relying instead on spin and on the endless regurgitation of the same tired old assertions: "we're real doctors; we treat real illnesses; our treatments are effective; and we deserve more respect." I have personally heard physicians make negative comments about psychiatry, but these have always been directed against the widely-acknowledged invalidity of its 'diagnoses,' and the general lack of science in the development and assessment of its 'treatments.'

This is the final of four installments about the bizarre, ongoing conduct of psychiatrists at Upton House, an Eastern Health psychiatric facility in Melbourne, and the collusion with their conduct by all relevant agencies. This last installment will document the failure, so far, of the State and Federal Governments to intervene in even this most extreme and blatant example of abuse of power by psychiatry. If I, as a Professor of Clinical Psychology with 40 years clinical and research experience in this field, can be so easily dismissed/ignored by the relevant systems in Victoria, what chance do the average users of mental health services and their families have of being heard in this State?

In this article I will attempt to debunk one of the great “scientific” smoke and mirrors shows of the past half century—the claim that stories of reunited separated MZ (monozygotic, identical) twin pairs indicate that heredity plays a major role in causing human behavioral differences. These stories, which are often used to sell the false ideology of genetic determinism, have entered the public imagination in a way that academic research results never could. Here I will show that these stories provide no evidence whatsoever that (as yet undiscovered) “genes for behavior” influence human behavioral development.