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.
A Tribute to Diana Rose
I remember her for her brutal honesty, her path-breaking work in service-user led research, and sadly, her pain.
Despite What You’ve Heard, “Schizophrenia” Is Not “80% Heritable”
Schizophrenia genetics researchers begin with false assumptions and then present and interpret data in ways that confirm these strong beliefs.
Study Finds the Majority of Increases in Symptoms During Antidepressant Tapering are Related to...
Past research has framed symptom increases during tapering and discontinuation of psychotropic drugs as a relapse of an underlying “illness.” A new preprint article...
Open Dialogue Studies Highlight Collaboration, Clinician Support, and Stable Costs
This week Mad in America examines three studies related to the Open Dialogue approach in mental healthcare. Open Dialogue is a mental health approach...
Your Vagus Nerve Is Not in Control: The Problem with Polyvagal Theory
In addition to being scientifically incorrect, there’s no reliable evidence that PVT works to relieve people of their symptoms or distress.
Psychiatry’s Attack Dog Is at It Again
Robert Whitaker responds to Awais Aftab's inaccurate smear campaign toward Mad in America and other critics.
Faith, Culture, and Coercion: An Interview with Cultural Psychiatrist G. Eric Jarvis
Cultural psychiatrist G. Eric Jarvis discusses religion and mental health, the social determinants of psychosis, and how coercive treatment can deepen mistrust in psychiatric care.
Rearranging Deck Chairs While the Titanic Goes Down—The American Society of Clinical Psychopharmacology Issues...
Clinicians seeking practical guidance about how to deprescribe in a safe, pharmacologically rational manner will find little here to assist them.
