Blogs

What is schizophrenia? According to the website of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), schizophrenia is a chronic, severe, incurable, and disabling brain disorder that affects about 1% of Americans today. Its cause is unknown but most experts assume it is genetic. According to E. Fuller Torrey, the founder and Executive Director of the Stanley Medical Research Institute and a high-profile schizophrenia researcher, “schizophrenia is caused by changes in the brain and ... these can be measured by changes in both brain structure and brain function. … Schizophrenia is thus a disease of the brain in exactly the same sense that Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, and Alzheimer’s disease are diseases of the brain.” Behind this confident rhetoric lies a heated controversy.

What are some tactics used by voices, and what can you do about it? I hope the suggestions in this piece can help desperate voice-hearers become more understanding of the forces behind their agony, and perhaps bring a more enlightened perspective to the chemically-lobotomizing tendencies of their psychiatrists who treat voices with more medication.

If we are going to really make a difference in the world of mental health stigma, we must get to the heart of the matter. All people deserve compassionate, honest care. All people, stigmatized and stigmatizers, deserve to be heard, understood, and valued, no matter what worth that society may place on them. I am my brother’s keeper. You are mine.

In spite of constantly increasing opportunities to tell different stories to the canonical story of bio-psychiatry, it can be risky for academics to voice a different perspective than the mainstream model of mental illness. In this conversation, a communication professor and a psychology professor discuss their challenges and personal experiences with going against the grain, such as what it means to be labeled “anti-psychiatry” by colleagues and responding to students upset to learn their medications may not be all they thought they were.

For a long time I have felt that there just isn’t a good enough and long enough study on the pros and cons of long-term antipsychotic treatment versus reduction and discontinuation in people who have psychotic disorders, including those who are classified as having schizophrenia. Moreover, there are increasing reasons to be worried about the effects of long-term treatment with antipsychotics. I put this case to the UK’s National Institute of Health Research recently, and proposed that they fund a trial to assess the long-term outcomes of a gradual programme of antipsychotic reduction compared with standard ‘maintenance treatment.’ The NIHR agreed that this was an important issue, and that a new trial was urgently needed. The RADAR (Research into Antipsychotic Discontinuation And Reduction) study officially started in January 2016.

I am trying to demonstrate, in a series of installments, how in the 21st century we still often fail to establish effective safeguards for the rights of people who end up in our psychiatric systems. This particular example is taking place in 2016, in Melbourne, and involves over 50 consecutive electro shock ‘treatments’ and multiple, sometimes very lengthy, periods of being tied to a bed. In this third installment, I offer my interactions with another body who is supposed to protect our rights when under the ‘care’ of psychiatrists, the Mental Health Tribunal.

Anxiety is an awful reality. You feel a horrible paralyzing fear in the core of your chest or stomach, spreading to your arms and legs. The uneasiness gnaws away at you, or spreads into an overwhelming panic. It is paralyzing, and relief can’t come soon enough. However, the myth that anxiety is a biological disease is false. The reason there is no evidence that human problems come from neurotransmitters and genetic defects is because it’s not true.

Peter Gøtzsche’s new book, Deadly Psychiatry and Organized Denial brings up an important and complex  issue.  How do psychiatrists get up in the morning and damage people all day long while pretending to help them?  The book is elegantly referenced – and I encourage everyone who practices thoughtful psychiatry to read it, because you need to be much better educated to practice high-quality mental health than you do to act as a dispensing machine.  Gøtzsche is absolutely right; on all levels psychiatrists are in denial about the damage that they are doing to patients.

The Future of Mental Health interview series continued this past week with some very interesting interviews, among them Sara Tai on inner city mental health, Russell Razzaque on psychiatry and mindfulness, and Jane Linsley on Gould Farm. Here is my interview with Oryx Cohen on his new film “Healing Voices” which will be premiering soon.

Vermont Governor Shumlin recently suggested a change to state law that would accelerate the process under which a person could be forced to take antipsychotic drugs against her will. The House Human Services Committee reviewed this proposal and I was asked to testify. What follows are my comments.

There has been quite a bit going on in the UK mental health world of late, and MiA already shares some of this in the form of open letters from Anne Cooke, et al. and Richard Bentall. Both are responses to a series of BBC programmes. In their letter Kinderman, et al. also make reference to a recently published report; The Five Year Forward View for Mental Health. This has been published by a so-called independent body; The Mental Health Taskforce to the NHS in England. Readers would find it encouraging; it refers to a need for closer attention to early intervention, to the need to address stigma, for a focus upon life’s transitions, and innovations that could support recovery, personal autonomy and well-being. What happened? Nothing!

On November 12th, 2015, the third anniversary of the day that I abruptly stopped taking benzodiazepines, my dear friend, J. Doe, published a two-part article here on Mad in America examining the language that is commonly used to describe benzodiazepine (benzo) iatrogenesis. I wanted a summary of these articles captured in a Youtube video so that those in the thick of benzo neurotoxicity could tune into these ideas in a way that might be more easily digestible. I hoped more benzo sufferers would begin to question how they describe (and allow others to describe) an illness that remains decades behind in understanding and recognition. I also wanted to draw attention to the content again in hopes that more medical professionals would read and understand the crucial distinctions in language surrounding this problem.

Massachusetts Bill HD 4554 needs to gain sufficient state representative support by Tuesday, March 1, 2016. This bill will put restrictions on the prescribing of benzodiazepines and non-benzodiazepine sleep aids, and will require that all patients be informed of the potential dangers of these drugs, specifically the dangers of long-term use.

I do not wish to discuss an individual patient. I wish to discuss the conduct of the psychiatrists at Upton House, Dr Katz in particular, who have been responsible for the administering of over 50 ECTs consecutively to a patient, and have reportedly repeatedly restrained this patient to a bed, on one occasion for approximately 60 consecutive days.

As both a pediatrician and psychoanalyst, D.W. Winnicott had a unique view of human development. In preparation for teaching a course on early childhood mental health I had the pleasure of reconnecting with the profound wisdom of his writings. While Winnicott wrote extensively for both a general and a professional audience, I discovered, on careful re-reading of his essay for a general audience entitled ""The Ordinary Devoted Mother"" that it contains a vast wealth of ideas, foreshadowing contemporary research at the intersection of developmental psychology, neuroscience and genetics that is revealing more every day of how early experience gets into the body and brain.

Mental health nurse education in not sufficiently critical of institutional psychiatric practice. Its formal curricula in universities are often undermined by the informal curricula of practice environments. As an institution, mental health nursing pays insufficient attention to both these issues because it is an arguably un-reflexive and rule-following discipline.

To create his theory of relativity, Einstein had to see things differently. He used imagination and empathy to come to know a new 'reality' of existence. In this essay, we delve deeply into the nature of human experiences that lead to public concern and discover ourselves in a whole new realm.

The following interview with Eleanor Longden, who is well known for her Ted Talk and her activism in the psychiatric survivor movement, is part of a “future of mental health” interview series that I’m currently conducting on my Psychology Today blog Rethinking Mental Health. To see the full interview roster, please visit http://ericmaisel.com/interview-series.

Following Richard Bentall’s inspired Open Letter to Stephen Fry, we – a group of people who have (and still do) use mental health services, who work in mental health, or who work as academics... or fall into more than one of those categories – have decided to write a parallel Open Letter to the BBC and other media organizations about their coverage of mental health issues. We need as many signatures as possible!

Stephen Fry’s exploration of manic depression (in the current BBC series on mental health, ‘In the Mind‘) has drawn both praise (because of his attempts to destigmatize mental illness) and criticism (because he appears to have a very narrow biomedical understanding of mental illness).  I have sent an open letter to the actor which challenges some of his assumptions about mental illness, and offers a very different understanding to that promoted in his recent television programme.

The 90s were labeled - rather optimistically - as the ‘decade of recovery.’ More recently, recovery has been placed slap bang central in mental health policy. Is supporting recovery pretty much good common sense? Or is the term being misused to pressure those suffering to behave in certain ways?

Over the past few weeks I have been witness to, and increasingly involved in trying to stop one of the most extreme examples of psychiatric brutality I have encountered in my 40 years in this field. And I have encountered quite a few. I suggest you sit down before watching and reading. This is not your usual, run-of-the-mill psychiatric abuse story.

Please join us in demanding that the FDA stop the shock device from being down-classified to a Class II device. We have until March 28th, 2016.

Depressed, anxious, and substance-abusing people can beat themselves up for being defective. And psychiatrists and psychologists routinely validate and intensify their sense of defectiveness by telling them that they have, for example, a chemical-imbalance defect, a genetic defect, or a cognitive-behavioral defect. For some of these people, it feels better to believe that they are essentially defective. But the “defect/medical model of mental illness” is counterproductive for many other people—especially those “untalented” in denial and self-deception—for whom there is another model and path that works much better.

Last week was my anniversary off a huge psych drug cocktail I’d been on for 20 years. In this video I speak to the inner resources that kept me going. The fact is there is nothing in society to help those who love us to understand what we are going through.