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It's no secret that at the present time, psychiatry is reeling under a barrage of scrutiny and criticism. Their long-standing contention that all significant problems of thinking, feeling, and/or behaving are brain illnesses "just like diabetes," which need to be "treated" with drugs and high-voltage electric shocks to the brain, has been thoroughly discredited. And yet they go on peddling their spurious, self-serving ideology and the products of their pharma partners. The great mystery in all of this is why has the mainstream media been so slow to pick up the story.

If you live on Earth and breathe, then you must overthrow what is mistakenly called “normal” and the mental health industry. Why? Today, our planet is faced with an unprecedented emergency, according to the vast majority of scientists, wise people and just about everybody else. It seems that the general public is paralyzed, and as our leaders continue to procrastinate, we are collectively entering into the beginning of chaos. In order to survive, we must get a little crazy

People hassle me for being anti-medication, and I always tell them I am NOT anti-medication; I am pro-fully-informed choice. But people like things black-and-white. They see me as being against medications, and so I'm telling you why medications may have saved my life yesterday, or at least saved me a whole bunch more trouble.

It is possible that if we ask “What happened to you?” instead of “What’s wrong with you?”, we wouldn’t see much of a change at all. Those people who are inclined to think of mental health problems as illnesses, as something “wrong,” would be able to explain that what happened to you was the cause of the illness; it produced what is wrong with you. It is much more crucial to understand “What is happening for you now?”

The science is settled. Psychiatry has trafficked in proclamation-based medicine, and is fast become the proving ground for corporate interests. You almost have to hand it to these corporations for their largely unfettered success in supporting the financial interests of their shareholders. The job of Big Pharma is not to care for you, protect your wellness, or heal your children. The job of Big Pharma is to win – win at the game of unbridled capitalism – and they have.

It is appropriate to hold a company or doctors who may be aiming to make money out of vulnerable people to a high standard when it comes to efficacy, but for those interested to advance the treatment of patients with any medical condition it is not appropriate to deny the likely existence of harms on the basis of a failure to reach a significance threshold that the very process of conducting an RCT will mean cannot be met, as investigators' attention is systematically diverted elsewhere.

The most difficult decision I have had to make as a clinician has been to send a person into a locked psychiatric unit for up to 72 hours. The emotional impact affects the individual who is going to be placed on the 72-hour hold, and their family. The emotions that are involved in the process of observing the person, collecting information, and finally making the life-altering decision are powerful and long-lasting for the person making the decision as well. That is, if they are compassionate and involved, and fully aware of the consequences.

All throughout life, trauma defines the negative elements of our environment. Just as responsiveness is the source of healing in the world, trauma is the agent of harm and damage. Trauma consists of abuse: sadism and cruelty; and deprivation: the cold absence of loving which generates the absence of the possibility of tender attachments. Trauma is an assault so extreme that it overrides and rewrites our otherwise healthy play of consciousness. It outpaces our flexibility to adapt, and writes a dark new play in its place.

I have lost interest in making sense. Insofar as anti-stigma entails a reassertion of my apparently forgotten humanity via the retelling of some personal narrative in which I generalize my unique experiences toward some universal wisdom, I have lost interest in the reduction of stigma. I would much prefer it if you didn’t need me to be comprehensible.

The authors of Study 329 began recruiting adolescents for a comparative study of Paxil, imipramine and placebo in 1994 and finished their investigations in 1997. They dropped a large number of their original cohort, so the randomness element in the study must be open to question. Late in 1998, SmithKline Beecham, the marketers of Paxil, acknowledged in an internal document that the study had shown that Paxil didn’t work for adolescents in terms of the two primary and six secondary outcomes they had established at the start of the study. In a nutshell, Study 329 was negative for efficacy and positive for harm, contrary to their succinct upbeat conclusion.

In 1980, the British Medical Journal published a “Systematic Review of the Benzodiazepines” by the Committee on the Review of Medicines. The committee denied the addictive potential of Benzodiazepines and limited their suggestions to short term use. The results have been devastating.

Years ago, a psychiatrist by the name of Theodore Lidz published a book entitled Schizophrenia and the Family.  Unlike many others of his time, he believed that schizophrenic symptoms were not necessarily the result of an underlying disease, but could be caused by dysfunctional parental behavior.  He noted that significant conflict and high levels of tension were not necessarily the cause of symptoms; in certain families, a pattern of “skewed” communication existed in which odd, often unhealthy patterns of interaction and behaviors were allowed and even supported by one spouse, which resulted in a confusing, distorted environment for the children.

I imagine that everybody on this side of the issue knows by now that the eminent psychiatrist Jeffrey Lieberman, MD, Chief Psychiatrist at Columbia, and past President of the APA, called Robert Whitaker "a menace to society." The grounds for Dr. Lieberman's vituperation were that Robert had dared to challenge some of psychiatry's most sacred tenets! But in all the furor, it was largely ignored that in the same interview Dr. Lieberman had said something else that warrants additional discussion.

Probiotics have certainly become quite the rage across the world for the treatment of all kinds of ailments from irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) to infectious diarrhoea to stress to low mood. Some might say that the enthusiasm has been rather slow to develop. Recently, the popular press has propagated the idea that probiotics are the next antidepressants.

Since the mid-1990s antipsychotic medications have been increasingly prescribed for children, adolescents, and adults. The most recent report finds an increase in use for older children from 2006 to 2008. Most of the prescriptions of antipsychotics for children reported by the study were for conditions which had not been approved by the FDA (called off-label use).

If someone were to ask the surviving authors of Study 329 the question: “Knowing what you know now, if you had to do it over, would you agree to participate in that study again?”, many would probably say no. Study 329’s problems started to surface right after it was published. Several doctors wrote letters to the JAACAP Editor with probing questions, mostly centred on the psychiatric side effects of paroxetine, and the measures used to claim its efficacy in treating adolescents. The authors responded and the questioners did not pursue their concerns further. Except one. Next week, fourteen years and two months after it was published, it is about to take yet another hit, when the Restored version is published.

In 2000, behavioral geneticist Eric Turkheimer proposed "Three Laws of Behavior Genetics" based on what he saw as the “nearly unanimous results” of behavioral genetic studies of families, twins, and adoptees. However, critics have argued for decades that most behavioral genetic assumptions, models, concepts, “laws,” and “discoveries” do not hold up under critical examination. In 2015, a group of behavioral geneticists proposed an additional “Fourth Law of Behavior Genetics,” which states that behavioral characteristics are associated with many genes of small effect. Here I propose a “Fifth Law” of behavior genetics—actually, the only “law” one needs to know in order to properly understand this field.

“Mental health” — a misnomer? If you don’t subscribe to the notion of “mental illness,” why “mental health”? Why not the straightforward acceptance that individuals will act in a manner peculiar to each? In short, why not an existential or phenomenological understanding of human behavior as rooted in an individual’s idiosyncrasies and life experiences rather than in her/his brain chemistry?

A shock wave hit American psychology this past July when news surfaced in the New York Times that the American Psychological Association (APA) “engaged in activity that would constitute collusion with the Bush administration to promote, support or facilitate the use of "enhanced" interrogation techniques by the United States in the war on terror.” The APA quickly responded. At its annual convention held in Toronto the next month, the APA Council of Representatives did the right thing and voted to bar psychologists from participating in national security interrogations. There were lots of mea culpas, praise for the whistleblowers, and vows of future transparency and “never again.”

If you looked at photos of Luke Montagu in the grounds of Mapperton, his stunning ancestral manor, you might well envy his lot. Look closer and you’ll sense that his story has not always been one of wine and roses, for the next Lord Sandwich has spent most of the last seven years in hell, thanks to the interventions of drug-obsessed psychiatrists. Yet, though his experience was heartbreaking, often terrifying, it is now becoming a story full of hope and resilience, of grace and grit, for he has co-founded the Council for Evidence-based Psychiatry as his contribution to the information war on the false or misleading claims made about the benefits of psychotropic drugs.

Most of the movies I've seen which feature psychiatrists portray them as concerned, empathetic listeners, working diligently to help clients disentangle or resolve some life crisis: a portrayal, incidentally, which is in marked contrast to the reality of the 15-minute, drug-pushing med-check. No amount of mental gymnastics or PR can address psychiatry's fundamental flaws.

In contemporary U.S. culture, people who intentionally hurt their bodies are called “insane.” We may starve ourselves or carve ourselves, taking to the extreme culturally-embedded norms like thinness in an effort to fight against marginalization or cope with internalized shame. But instead of obtaining the voice or place in society we yearn for, we are further ostracized.

The suggestion embedded in this article’s title seems counter-intuitive. How could the tide be turning on psychiatry when the institution has never been so strong? And indeed indicators of its growing strength and tenacity are all around us. The exporting of its model to the global south via the World Bank, the emergence of outpatient committal, the explosion of funding for psychiatric research. Daily are there calls for most aggressive “detection” and “treatment.” And the mainstream press has never been more closed to truly foundational critiques. That acknowledged, let me suggest that such intensification is common when an old system is in the early days of crumbling.

In the last couple of weeks, I've read two articles in which the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) is described as being the “largest organization representing people living with serious mental illness.” Putting aside (for the moment) my issues with the use of blanket ‘mental illness’ terminology; since exactly when did they become a group that represents people who have been so labeled in any genuine sort of way? Until our voices are seen as having equal value and are given equal space, those that do not understand and lack insight into our experiences (whether they possess good intent or not) will continue to be the ones to define our past, present and future in the public eye.

In addition to hosting the Panorama programs and The Famous Grouse history of Study 329, Study329.org has a comprehensive timeline on the origins of concerns about the SSRIs and the risk of suicide, initially with Prozac and subsequently with Paxil/Seroxat. The hope is to provide a comprehensive repository for anyone who wants to study SSRIs, RCTs, and Study 329 in particular.