Disorders

Antipsychotic medications that are commonly being used to help control behaviors in elderly people with dementia seem to be causing premature deaths at high rates.

“The voices, they tell me they gonna kill me, and it’s my fault.” “Sometimes, when we hear voices, they just reflect our own anxieties, sometimes they can echo things we’ve been told in the past. When the voices tell you that they’re going to kill you, does that echo anything you may have been told in the past?” I ask.

A new study finds that individuals being treated with open-label placebos showed significant reductions in pain and disability, even when compared to individuals receiving treatment as usual.

I believe the video ‘Voices Matter’ has, quite apart from capturing the spirit of the Hearing Voices movement, filmed the first signs, the first moments of professional interest, hinting at the dangers that inevitably are present when a movement threatens the established order of things.

From Psychiatric Services: A recent study found that consumers who experienced low quality inpatient psychiatric care were less likely to trust the mental health system. Consumers...

Seeking to rectify the fact that "no meta-analysis has included measures of quality of life, global mental health, self-esteem, or autonomy" (or self-reports of...

Officials at a school that was more focused on ADHD diagnoses described children’s behavior in terms of individual illnesses, taking children out of the context of their social interactions, race, gender, and socioeconomic status.

When I was a young adult, I was misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder and placed on lithium. I am 61 years old now, living on the edge of end-stage kidney disease. If I could undo everything, by all means, I would not have taken this drug. It is not safe for anyone at any age.

Fifteen years ago this month we were sitting together in the basement of Peter’s house. We had felt a sense of despair at the widespread misinformation and atrocious stereotypes that were dominating media coverage of mental health at the time. We felt that our profession had a responsibility to challenge these stereotypes, and that as psychologists we had something unique to contribute. That was the time when research into the psychology of psychosis was beginning to burgeon, and many of our findings challenged not only the stereotypes but – perhaps more significantly - much ‘accepted wisdom’ within mental health services as well.

Researchers in Denmark found, in a study of 49 remitted bipolar patients published in the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, that beliefs...

In a pilot study at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, researchers found that Future-Directed Therapy (FDT) improved quality of life and relieved depressive...

An article in the Wall Street Journal today explores the phenomenon of children growing up on antidepressants. Article → 

Scapegoating a purported unseen "illness" may provide temporary comfort from acknowledging the horrors and injustice of the world, but it is a delusion — and one with fatal consequences for many. When 45,000 people a year would rather die than live in this world any longer, it might behoove us all to consider what is happening in the world to cause this.

“Adolescents whose mothers took certain antidepressants while pregnant with them are more than four times as likely to become depressed by age 15, compared with...

The kinds of experiences we call psychotic are often incredibly scary: people feel they are being persecuted by strange forces, or that their brains have been invaded by demons or riddled with implants from the CIA . . . the list of possible fears is endless, and often horrifying. While standard mental health approaches counter many of these fears, they often create new fears of a different variety.   Wouldn’t it be helpful if professionals were trained in an approach that could help people shift away from both dangerous psychotic ways of thinking and also away from the sometimes equally terrifying explanations which emphasize pathology?

ProPublica explains why a university mental health center contacted the estranged parents of a student over eighteen without her consent, and why another student’s personal counseling records were used against her in a sexual-assault investigation.

My world turned upside down when my daughter nearly died from a serious suicide attempt. After several years as her caretaker I began to wonder: What can we do to change the way our mental health services are organized so they won't turn a crisis into a way of life for already distressed and vulnerable people?

What makes the DSM so pernicious is that it is a cultural document whose influence transcends not only psychiatric practice but also the Western civilization from which it originates. Each revision of the DSM rescripts and reimagines how we make sense of our experiences, reinterprets what thoughts, feelings and behaviors are socially sanctioned, and ultimately what it means to be human.

A closer look at a new study reporting that the supplement D-cycloserine improved anxiety when used with exposure therapy.

Losing a loved one to suicide hurts like hell: there’s an obvious truth if there ever was one. But there are other truths, some hard, some hopeful. If you’ve suffered such a loss yourself, you know too much of these truths already.

A study in Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology finds that in a sample of 641 adopted adolescents, an increase in the level of ADHD...

Writing in the British Journal of Clinical Psychology, London researchers find that perceptions of lower social rank and inferiority amongst 24 individuals with early...

In this piece for Beyond Meds, Chris Cole examines the intersection of racism and oppression against people labeled "mentally ill." "This is where social justice becomes...

A team of American pediatric physicians has published an article in the journal Pediatrics examining the many ways in which medical overdiagnosis may be...

From Nature: Two teams funded by the US military's research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), have begun preliminary trials of brain implants...