Causation Theories

From CNBC: A recent report by Goldman Sachs analysts questions whether curing patients, as opposed to providing them with chronic therapies, could pose a financial...

On May 5, 2012,  MindFreedom International is holding its Occupy the American Psychiatric Association protest at the APA's annual convention in Philadelphia.  Momentum is building for the...

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?

Researchers at Emory University find that childhood trauma, sensitivity to psychosocial stress and a heightened biological response to stress are associated with the onset...

In Medscape, three psychiatrists discuss the new definitions in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders for grief, complicated grief, depression and major depression, and try to explain how to reliably distinguish between them all.

In our field, there is a significant “missing heritability” between rates of “schizophrenia” in monozygotic twins and the combined reduced influence of genetic variants identified in genome-wide association studies (GWAS). The 80% figure often given as a heritability factor is somewhat misleading for students in our field who do not know how the H2 statistic is derived and various ways of deriving it. Through extensive molecular biological research of the most recent studies on monozygotic twins I have derived a theory which will make a much stronger case for socioenvironmental influences on what was previously though of in classically genetic terms.

From the University of Liverpool News: In a new podcast, Dr. Peter Kinderman, the vice-president of the British Psychological Society, argues that emotional distress is...

Accumulating evidence points to serious risks associated with antidepressant use during pregnancy, yet data suggests that prescriptions continue to rise in the US. "Given...

In a lead editorial, The Lancet took the position that the proposed revision to the DSM that would modify the exclusion for bereavement "is not...

For The New Yorker, David Kushner writes about post-traumatic growth, the sense of deepened meaning that many trauma survivors experience. “The existence of post-traumatic...

New research emphasizes the impact of school connectedness and community engagement interventions on students' mental health.

-Psychiatrists analyze why US bipolar diagnoses in children and adolescents increased 40 times over in less than 10 years.

A new review finds that dehumanizing language, including self-dehumanization, is connected to anxiety, depression, and disordered eating.

Research finds that hearing negative voices explains how childhood adversity is related to distress.

From Acting NT: Many mental health advocates have objected to the Netflix series 13 Reasons Why, which centers around the suicide of a teenage girl. Here...

From Alternet: Applications that provide online counseling, such as BetterHelp and Talkspace, are increasing in popularity. While some studies support the effectiveness of virtual therapy,...

From YES! Magazine: Lament singing, an ancient tradition once observed for spiritual purposes during funerals, weddings, and times of war, is now seeing a revival in...

The label of schizophrenia has a chilling ring. It carries with it the suggestion of a wrecked and wretched life. It is also a diagnosis that is notoriously difficult to shed. For this reason, the diagnosis of schizophrenia should not be applied lightly and not without a thorough understanding of the patient’s family and wider circumstances.

To coincide with World Mental Health Day on October 10th, 2015, Verso Books, the largest independent and radical publishing house released a series of blogs on mental health and critical and antipsychiatry. The posts include pieces on R.D. Laing, colonialism, women’s oppression, delusions and art, “The Happiness Industry,” and social and institutional oppression.

In this piece for Vice, Tess McClure describes New Zealand's Mad Pride movement, a movement that seeks to destigmatize, normalize, and celebrate experiences of voice-hearing...

From BBC: According to survey results from the UK mental health charity Mind, a third of men experiencing poor mental health attribute their suffering to workplace...

This blog was prompted by an invitation to do a guest post on the site of one of my favorite bloggers, 1 Boring Old Man. This is my response to the notion that there are certain conditions - Schizophrenia among them - that correspond more directly to biomedical conditions

From The Kansas City Star: A new study from the University of Michigan has found a link between spanking and serious problems in adulthood including mental health...

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.

A new study finds that stimulant prescribing rates to children continue to rise despite the well-established evidence documenting overdiagnosis of ADHD and overprescription of stimulants.