Disorders

In a recent Ted Talk, “Depression is a Disease of Civilization.” professor Stephen Ilardi advances the thesis that depression is a disease of our modern lifestyle. As an example, Ilardi compares our modern culture to the Kaluli people — an indigenous tribe that lives in the highlands of New Guinea. When an anthopologist interviewed over 2,000 Kaluli, he found that only one person exhibited the symptoms of clinical depression, despite the fact the Kaluli are plagued by high rates of infant mortality, parasitic infection, and violent death. Yet, despite their harsh lives, the Kaluli do not experience depression as we know it.

A review published by Romanian and German researchers in the Journal of Molecular Psychiatry suggests that many psychiatric conditions have strong links to Irritable...

Autism and rates of other neurogically-related problems are higher in areas where large amounts of chemical pesticides are used, according to University of California...

No one has been tracking whether or not US veterans have been benefiting in any way from over $3.2 billion annually in mental health...

Fox CT has posted a video of their full 17-minute interview of teen Justina Pelletier by journalist Beau Berman, shortly after Justina's release from...

Psychiatric Times has published a discussion of the research comparing the effectiveness of antidepressant medications under different conditions. “First, there seem to be no...

As a trauma survivor growing up in various adolescent mental health systems, I never learned any useful self-care tools or practices. I was taught that my current coping skills (self-injury, suicidal behavior, illicit drug use) were unacceptable, but not given any ideas as to what to replace them with. No one seemed to want to know much about the early childhood traumas that were driving these behaviors. Instead, I collected an assortment of diagnoses. I was told that I would be forever dependent on mediated relationships with professionals, and an ever-changing combination of pills. The message was that my troubles were chemical in nature and largely beyond my control.

Examining the link between depression and loss of employment, a study by American researchers in the British Journal of Psychiatry found that cognitive therapy...

An entire special issue of the journal Children & Society is dedicated to examining questions surrounding “psychiatrised children.” Various studies explore how rarely children’s...

Researcher Michele Tine of Dartmouth College’s Poverty and Learning Lab reports in the journal Frontiers in Psychology that 12 minutes of aerobic exercise caused...

National Institute of Mental Health Director Thomas Insel suggests in his blog that the fact 4.3% of American children are taking psychostimulants may not...

Noting that "childhood adversity is gaining increasing attention as a plausible etiological factor in the development of psychotic disorders," researchers from Johns Hopkins, Aarhus...

My heart envisions a future of grassroots community-based, free, accessible, welcoming, non-judgmental and safe spaces for young people in the middle of the hurricane of adolescence....They will be spaces facilitated by those of us who’ve reclaimed what it means to be human.

My mother was once a bright, creative, beautiful young woman, a promising artist and a poet, who was captivated by the hippie movement. She was a creative bohemian artist, defying the conventions of our middle-class Jewish Midwestern family, which had carried a tradition of holding emotions inside and acting stoic. One day, soon after my grandparents’ divorce, she left. She hitched a ride to California, and from that point on, was never the same. The police picked her up on a park bench in Arizona, and she was committed for the first time at age 18. She rotated in and out of mental hospitals, the streets, and jail until her death.

The Melbourne Herald Sun reports that "The prescription of some atypical antipsychotics has more than doubled . . . Psychiatrist Dr George Halasz who has been vocal about...

Before we get to the meat and potatoes documenting how this headline is not only shocking but also accurate, you must know that a secondary goal of this blog is to test a few theories. I have been pondering these theories because it seems to be a mystery as to why (after more than two decades of whistleblowers warning the public) so many adults have not heard or heeded the news that ADHD stimulant drugs, which are not that different from cocaine, are extremely dangerous for kids.

The alleged “Prom day” killer, Christopher Plaskon, is a snap shot of the future result of Connecticut’s increased mental health services. The 17 year-old's defense apparently will be that his “mental health” caused his murderous actions – not the dangerous psychiatric drugs he obviously has been taking for some time.

Rates of adverse outcomes, including premature death and violent crime, have increased among people with schizophrenia and related diagnoses since the 1970s when compared to...

Sometimes I get so sick of the lies of biological psychiatry that I must speak out. At these moments I find silence to be a kind of emotional death: a death of my spirit, a death of my critical faculties, a death of my courage. I speak out because I am alive and I wish to align with life.

When Doug Turkington, a UK psychiatrist, first announced to his colleagues that he wanted to help people with psychotic experiences by talking to them, he was told by some that this would just make them worse, and by others that this would be a risk to his own mental health, and would probably cause him to become psychotic! Fortunately, he didn’t believe either group, and in the following decades he went on to be a leading researcher and educator about talking to people within the method called CBT for psychosis.

On May 16, 2014, I retired from a 35-year career as a professor of clinical psychology at Miami University. As a part of my retirement celebration, I gave a Final Lecture to my Department. These Final Lectures give retiring faculty members the opportunity to talk about anything they think is important for their colleagues and the attending students to hear. I focused on the changes I have witnessed in the profession of clinical psychology over my career; changes that were not for the better.

The New York Times Profiles Bessel van der Kolk, and the controversial approaches to working with trauma, such as yoga and "tapping," that he...

Based on my experience both as a therapist and client in the mental health field, I have learned that when therapists or psychiatrists give you the following diagnoses all too often here is what they really mean:

The problem with instituting sweeping, costly and invasive mental health legislation is that there always are unintended consequences. The State of Connecticut, when passing Public Act 13-3, apparently didn’t consider that there are two sides to every story. And when it comes to “mental health” there most definitely is another side beyond the mental health we-need-early-intervention-to-help-those-suffering mantra.

On May 16, the New York Times ran an article titled Thousands of Toddlers Are Medicated for A.D.H.D., Report Finds, Raising Worries, by Alan Schwarz.  Here is the opening sentence: "More than 10,000 American toddlers 2 or 3 years old are being medicated for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder outside established pediatric guidelines, according to data presented on Friday by an official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."