Independent Evaluation Finds No Benefit to Coercion Under New York’s Kendra’s Law
Kendra’s Law is a New York State statute that allows courts to force people with “severe mental illness” into involuntary Assisted Outpatient Treatment (AOT)....
Antidepressants Can Change Peaceful Citizens into Killers
We must warn about the harms of antidepressants and bring people to justice who contribute to the suicides and homicides by lies and medical malpractice.
The West Doesn’t Have All the Answers: An Interview with Dinesh Bhugra
In this wide-ranging conversation on public mental health, psychiatrization, and community care, Dinesh Bhugra explains why meaningful lives, not symptom reduction alone, should guide mental healthcare today.
When Treatment Fails: Why I Relate to Lindsay Clancy
Despite her monstrous act, I can’t shake the feeling that Lindsay may have also suffered at the hands of a broken psychiatric system.
Unlearning Restraints: A Psychiatrist’s Journey from Patient to Practitioner
I had been the one whose fear was called dangerous, distorted into a label. Now I was on the other side, being asked to do it to someone else.
OCD and the Anxiety/Gut Connection
I never made the direct connection between my gut and how anxiety created physical problems! Why did not one single medical professional tell me this information?
Go/No-Go—How Mental Health Research Took a Wrong Turn: An Interview with Author Marianne Apostolides
Marianne Apostolides discusses how Go/No-Go grew from her search for new eating-disorder treatments into a critique of the metaphors, experiments, and technologies shaping contemporary neuroscience and psychiatry. She argues that efforts to reduce distress to circuits, algorithms, and biomarkers often overlook subjectivity, agency, and the human relationships that meaningful care requires.
How the Moral Panic on Psychiatric Bed Shortages is Fueling a ‘Competency Crisis’ in...
The number of people referred to state hospitals as ‘Incompetent to stand trial’ (IST) has surged over the last decade. In response, states are refurbishing or rebuilding their state hospitals— even as their own experts say this will only make the crisis worse. Why?
In the Lindsay Clancy Case, Polypharmacy Will Be on Trial
Lindsay Clancy worsened while under the influence of psychiatric drugs, and at each step she desperately sought medical help.
When Therapy Makes Things Worse
This week, Mad in America examines three articles related to negative effects of psychotherapy. The first reviews the literature around negative effects in therapy,...
Unlearn Your Pain: Harnessing the Power of Neuroplasticity – A Conversation With Howard Schubiner
Dr. Howard Schubiner joins us on the MIA podcast to discuss his work and the power of neuroplasticity to address psychological or physiological pain.
“Every Time I Took a Pill, I Felt I Was No Longer Myself”: Young...
A new study published online by the Journal of Humanistic Psychology examines young adults’ experience of taking and discontinuing antipsychotic drugs after completing a...
Inside the Hot Flush Gold Rush: The Medicalization of Menopause Spreads to Perimenopause
Many brands promising to help women actually make their suffering worse by reinforcing the belief that menopause is a time of deterioration.
How Psychiatry Launders Our Debts: An Interview with Khameer Kidia
Physician-anthropologist Khameer Kidia examines how violence and inequality shape mental distress, arguing for patient autonomy, community care, and structural change beyond diagnosis, medication, and individualized psychiatric treatment.
Shifting Acute Mental Health Care to the Home Limits the Cycle of Rehospitalization, Study...
Intensive home treatment (IHT) is an approach to acute psychiatric care that avoids the stressful psychiatric ward admission procedures and allows the patient or...
What’s Been Lost in Medicine Is Shameful in Psychiatry: Reflections on Bernard Lown
Mental health professionals are trained to be technicians rather than provided with the opportunity to discover the craft of healing.
Doctors Who Avoid Conversations: How Psychiatry Made Me Ill
Not one of the doctors ever asked how I was feeling or doing. They were never willing to have conversations or sort through problems with me, even though they said I was ill.
Nobody Told Me to Do This: What It Means to Be a Dissident Psychiatrist
Reckoning with my own story became the vehicle for reckoning with my profession—and with what psychiatric care does to the people we care for.
Using Lived Experience to Challenge Systemic Prescriber Inexperience of Antidepressant Withdrawal
Carla Delgado joins us to discuss her experience of antidepressant withdrawal and the hurdles created by dealing with a system that is largely ignorant of withdrawal and tapering.
An Attorney Goes Public—My Experience of Misdiagnosis, Damaging Drugs, and Lack of Informed Consent
Without complete transparency, consent cannot be considered truly informed. While silence may feel safe, it keeps us immobilized.
On Psychological Abuse: How The System Twisted My Pleas For Help
I once heard a fellow survivor describe narcissistic abuse as a “rape of the soul,” and that is exactly how it felt for me.
Surviving Psychiatry’s ‘Help’
I can never visit a zoo again after my experience in the acute ward. I could never watch an animal pace back and forth.
Mercy, Magic, and the Medical Humanities: An Interview with Jussi Valtonen
Novelist and neuropsychologist Jussi Valtonen explains how close reading and creative writing can sharpen clinical attention, deepen perspective-taking, and help clinicians notice the language they use to describe patients.
Beyond Medication: What England’s Experience Can Teach Us About Psychosis Care
For over twenty years, NICE in England has recommended that people experiencing psychosis should be offered psychological therapy.
Reconstructing 20+ Years of Psychiatric Treatment Through Medical Records
Seeing it laid out on paper felt like discovering an inventory of damage. It was an astonishing amount of intervention for someone who kept getting worse.
