ďťż”Broken Brains” and “Beautiful Minds”
When I first interviewed Brandon Banks, in the spring of 2008, while researching Anatomy of an Epidemic, he had recently entered Elizabethtown Community College...
Recent Advances In Understanding Mental Illness and Psychotic Experiences
Report from June of 2000 by the British Psychological Society
Recent Advances In Understanding Mental Illness and Psychotic Experiences        ...
Inbetweenland Reflections
Jacks McNamara is a genderqueer artist, writer, organizer, and healer.
Jacks co-founded The Icarus Project and is the subject of the poetic documentary Crooked Beauty. They...
A Journey Into Madness and Back Again: Part 3
The idea of spending more time as a bureaucrat in the US Embassy in Iceland did not appeal to me. I longed for the freedom that academics have. While pursuing that dream I stumbled into the world of international media, âchemical imbalanceâ, book publishing and a greedy professor of psychiatry which was a prelude to my second annus horribilis.
Childhood Maltreatment Reduces Hippocampal Volume
Researchers at Harvard University, in the largest and most detailed study on the topic to date, found that childhood maltreatment is significantly associated with...
Life for Psychiatrists after Reading Bob Whitaker: Let’s Take Back Substance Abuse Treatment
An astounding development is the explosion in the numbers of substance abusers being diagnosed with Bipolar. I teach a class in Substance Abuse at...
The Smartphone Psychiatrist
In this piece for The Atlantic, David Dobbs delves into the life of former NIMH director Thomas Insel, his critiques of research within the field of...
Go to Sleep
A blog in Scientific American reviews sleepâs role in "Obesity, Schizophrenia, Diabetes... Everything".  The article notes  a tight link between depression and sleep apnea,...
Medicine Can Soothe a Troubled Mind, but Not Without Costs
From The New York Times: In a new book, Blue Dreams, psychologist and patient Lauren Slater critiques the drug-based model of psychiatric care, debunking the chemical...
Researchers Faked Data on Epigenetics of Bipolar Disorder
The British Journal of Psychiatry has issued a retraction of an article purporting to have identified evidence of the epigenetic aspects of bipolar disorder,...
âPsychiatric DrugâNot AntibioticâMesses with Gut Microbes, Spurs Obesityâ
In a series of experiments in mice, researchers found that the drug risperidone alters gut microbes, which in turn profoundly influence metabolism, weight, and overall health.
Antidepressant-Induced Mania
It is generally recognized in antipsychiatry circles that antidepressant drugs induce manic or hypomanic episodes in some of the individuals who take them. Psychiatry's usual response to this is to assert that the individual must have had an underlying latent bipolar disorder that has "emerged" in response to the improvement in mood. The problem with such a notion is that it is fundamentally unverifiable.
Mental Health Documentary “Healing Voices” Premiers Across 130 Communities in 8 Countries
The producers of âHealing Voicesâ Ââ a new social action documentary about mental health Ââ are releasing the film via community screening partners in...
Update on the Association Between ADHD and Bipolar
Researchers from the MRC Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre of King's College's Institute of Psychiatry in London, publishing in the Journal of Affective...
Pilot Study Adapts Open Dialogue for US Health Care
In an article for Psychiatric Services, psychiatrist Christopher Gordon and his colleagues report on the results of a one-year feasibility study attempting to implement...
Outcome of Mood Disorders Before Psychopharmacology
A "systematic review" of all outcome studies of patients with mood disorders, in the March issue of the Australia & New Zealand Journal of...
âDoctors Tell Sinead OâConnor: âYouâre Not Bipolarââ
Sinead says she was misdiagnosed after giving birth eight years ago and has suffered greatly from the psychiatric drugs she was prescribed. âThey are...
The Breaking Point
How did I become someone who could barely function? I was a high-performing sales executive ranked in the top 2% of an international business communications company. But now, after using powerful psych meds for depression and anxiety for more than a decade, I couldnât do basic things like go to the grocery store, plan a meal, make dinner, or get together with friends.
Polypharmacy/Bipolar illness
A. Bipolar Illness Before the Psychopharmacology Era
Prior to 1955, bipolar illness was a rare disorder. There were only 12,750 people  hospitalized with that disorder...
New Research Documents Widening Mortality Gap for Bipolar and Schizophrenia
Analysis of longitudinal data from 2000-2014 demonstrate mortality gap is widening between persons with a diagnosis of bipolar or schizophrenia compared to the general population
100% Of DSM Schizophrenia and Mood Disorder “Experts” Have Ties to Drug Companies
A 2006 study in the journal Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics finds that 100% of schizophrenia and mood disorder experts and over 80% of other experts advising...
Premature Births Linked to Various Psychiatric Diagnoses
In one of the first, and the largest, studies of relationships between premature births and severe psychiatric disorders, researchers from Sweden and England examined...
Bipolar Diagnosis Linked to Childhood Adversity
With the ties between traumatic childhood experiences and mental health issues, should we continue to focus on biological approaches?
Trump’s Pick to Run Mental Health
From STAT: President Trump has nominated Dr. Elinore McCance-Katz, a proponent of increased psychiatric treatment for those diagnosed with serious mental illness, to run the Substance...
Researchers Call for Reappraisal of Adverse Mental Effects of Antipsychotics, NIDS
In a study published yesterday, researchers from the Nippon Medical School in Tokyo bring attention to a condition known as neuroleptic-induced deficit syndrome (NIDS)...