Disorders

KMSP News has aired a report of yet another mentally ill man pressured to enroll in a study of an unapproved antipsychotic drug, with near-disastrous results. His story bears a striking resemblance to the case of Dan Markingson, who committed suicide in a University of Minnesota study in 2004.

Dr. Mercola writes that "the high rates of psychotropic drug use among foster children and poor children is likely a direct result of drug...

Greg Young, who leapt to his death from the top of Niagara Falls, "had been on numerous medications, all of which came with warnings...

As we develop critical awareness about the mental health “treatments” that don’t work and that often make things much worse, the question inevitably comes up, what can those who want to be helpful be doing instead?

Professor Leigh Turner of the University of Minnesota Center for Bioethics blasts the Board of Regents for ignoring psychiatric research abuse.

The authors of a recent study acknowledge that "social functioning deficits are a core component of schizophrenia spectrum disorders." [Emphasis added] With this in mind, it seems to me that the best and most parsimonious way to conceptualize the research finding is that children who have poor social skills will, in many cases, grow up to be adults with poor social skills. In particular, there seems to me no justification (other than psychiatric dogmatism) to conceptualize the matter in medical terms, and to impose a medical framework – "a marker of vulnerability" – on the data.

The title of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s book Manufacturing Consent derives from presidential advisor Walter Lippmann’s phrase “the manufacture of consent”—a necessity for Lippmann, who believed that the general public is incompetent in discerning what’s truly best for them, and so their opinion must be molded by a benevolent elite who do know what’s best for them. Why has the American public not heard psychiatrists in positions of influence on the mass media debunk the chemical imbalance theory? Big Pharma’s corruption of psychiatry is only part of the explanation. Many psychiatrists, acting in the manner of a benevolent elite, did not alert the general public because they believed that the chemical imbalance theory was a useful fiction to get patients to accept their mental illness and take their medication. In other words, the chemical imbalance theory was an excellent way to manufacture consent.

I recently had the great pleasure of hosting a Hearing Voices workshop with Ron Coleman and Karen Taylor. The response was overwhelmingly positive. Many people described this as one of the best trainings they had ever attended. Ron's message is inherently uplifting - after all this internationally known educator was once a mental patient given a poor prognosis. But in addition, they offered pragmatic suggestions for how to think about voices and talk to someone who is experiencing them.

My name is Leah Harris and I'm a survivor. I am a survivor of psychiatric abuse and trauma. My parents died largely as a result of terrible psychiatric practice. Psychiatric practice that took them when they were young adults and struggling with experiences they didn’t understand. Experiences that were labeled as schizophrenia. Bipolar disorder. My parents were turned from people into permanent patients. They suffered the indignities of forced treatment. Seclusion and restraint. Forced electroshock. Involuntary outpatient commitment. And a shocking amount of disabling heavy-duty psychiatric drugs. And they died young, from a combination of the toxic effects of overmedication, and broken spirits.

Chuck Norris writes in WND: "I believe that too many who struggle with mild cases of depression don’t think they can find genuine relief...

In the last few years I’ve developed a sincere admiration for those youth workers who specialise in working with young people pushed out onto the edge of society. I’ve witnessed, first hand, the ease with which they can broach topics that would leave many of us feeling uncomfortable. The best of them can speak about sex, violence, drugs and exploitation in a real and pragmatic way that signals a deep acceptance and understanding of the dilemmas young people face – with no blame or judgement. This ability to transform the taboo into the ordinary is something I’ve tried to develop in my own work. Through Voice Collective, a project supporting children and young people who hear voices in London, I specialise in training youth workers to do the one thing that can push them far outside of their comfort zone – talking with young people about hearing voices.

On April 11, 2014, journalist Alan Schwarz published an article in the New York Times on this topic, titled Idea of New attention Disorder Spurs Research, and Debate. In the article Alan draws attention to the fact that sluggish cognitive tempo (SCT) is being promoted as a new disorder  "… characterized by lethargy, daydreaming and slow mental processing."  He makes the obviously valid point, that the formalization of such an entity  "… could vastly expand the ranks of young people treated for attention problems."

In 1993, the World Health Bank estimated that domestic violence, or intimate partner violence (IPV), was a greater cause of poor health than traffic accidents and malaria combined. It was believed that 5-20% of healthy years lost for women were attributed to IPV. By definition, violence is considered to be any physical, verbal, or sexual assault that significantly comprises a person’s body, trust, and sense of self. But it is not solely a female issue even as women are disproportionately perpetrated against in this way. Results from a study conducted in the United States found that 22.1 percent of women and 7.4 percent of men reported acts of IPV in their lifetime.

Julia Llewellyn Smith reports in the Telegraph that "Last year, 53 million prescriptions were issued for antidepressants in England alone, nearly double the number prescribed a...

"For the past eight years, Vicki Dyer has been the program director of the dementia ward at Lakewood, a continuing care centre in Waterville, Me.,...

An article in the Harvard Review of Psychiatry finds that the UK's new guidelines for treating attention and depression problems in children recommend a...

My friend Jake, in his words, experienced two decades of intense declining psychosis, terrifying and agonizing beyond comprehension. These states were triggered when he was in college and tried out a simple chakra meditation every day for one year. He describes the states of consciousness he couldn't understand that resulted from it as possibly kundalini energy and/or psychic attack.

Nathaniel Ayers, the violin-playing subject of the 2009 film "The Soloist," continues to fight against efforts to compel him to take antipsychotic medication.  "....

One of the developers of Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy explains the history of its development.

A new article by Peter Breggin, in the journal Children & Society, outlines The Rights of Children and Parents In Regard to Children Receiving...

In former times, children who were routinely inattentive and impulsive were considered to be in need of training and discipline. By and large, school teachers and parents provided this. In fact, the training was usually provided before the matter even became an issue. Today these children are spuriously and arbitrarily labeled as ill, and are given pills. At the present time the pharma-psychiatric system is being widely exposed as the spurious, destructive, disempowering fraud that it is. Organized psychiatry is responding to these criticisms not by cleaning up its act, but instead by increasing its lobbying activity in the political arena.

Author and clinical psychologist Bruce Levine discusses society's relationship to drugs, psychiatry's increasing credibility issue, and the cultural response to incidents of mass violence.

Results from a pilot study called Imagining Autism suggests that drama workshops help children with autism-spectrum disorders. Drama Helps Kids with Autism Communicate Better (New Scientist)

Research on 966 mother-child pairs from the Childhood Autism Risks from Genetics and the Environment (CHARGE) Study finds that prenatal SSRI exposure was nearly 3...

"People have these unaccountable mystic experiences," Barbara Ehrenreich tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross about her new book, Living With a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search...