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To help my non-recovery oriented colleagues understand the stigma/resentment associated with ‘borderline personality disorder,’ I simply mention this: “Let’s say I call you and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got a referral for you. She’s been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder . . .’” I need to go no further; without fail, my colleague will smile or laugh. We both know that such a referral is a no-no, so much so that it doesn’t even have to be mentioned; it is a given.

Psychiatrists at the University of Minnesota forced a young man into a profitable study of antipsychotic drugs over the objections of his mother, who desperately warned that his condition was deteriorating and that he was in danger of killing himself. On May 8, 2004, Mary Weiss' only son, Dan Markingson, committed suicide. A petition to the governor of Minnesota now asks for an investigation.

The last four years I've been running Poetry for Personal Power, a stigma reduction campaign funded by SAMHSA. Poetry for Personal Power has been going to Missouri Universities and asking students what they do to get through hard times and we now have about 400 incredible videos on You-Tube, with youth wellness tools.

Human behavioral genetics and its allied field of psychiatric genetics are in trouble, as unfulfilled gene discovery expectations during the “euphoria of the 1980s” have continued to the present day, leading to researchers’ “nonreplication curse” dysphoria of the 2010s. In my recent book The Trouble with Twin Studies: A Reassessment of Twin Research in the Social and Behavioral Sciences, I presented a detailed argument that genetic interpretations of the common “classical twin method” finding that reared-together MZ twin pairs resemble each other more (correlate higher) for behavioral characteristics than do reared-together same-sex DZ twin pairs are invalid because, among other reasons, the twin method’s crucial MZ-DZ “equal environment assumption” (EEA) is false.

Our lives changed the day we began looking inside ourselves for ways to move towards more joy and less suffering for us and those around us. We took ownership of the good and bad from our past and learned that if we came from a place of inner strength we could frame much of our future. The lessons and necessary mentoring that led to us reshaping our experiences happened within the context of addiction treatment. This treatment for us, and many others, consisted of working on ourselves with the guidance of people who had re-built - or built for the first time - daily lives rich in meaning and social connection.

My name is Mark Ragins. Most people at The Village call me Dr. Mark, except those who have known me long enough to forego that pedestal and just call me Mark. I’m a psychiatrist, a story teller, and the kid who used to drive his parents and teachers crazy asking “Why?” unendingly and then, never satisfied with their answers, looked for my own answers and returned to tell them that their answers were wrong. When I meet someone new I usually try not to tell them I’m a psychiatrist too soon. There are so many strange and scary ideas about psychiatrists and mental illnesses out there that I’m afraid I’ll be rejected before I even have a chance.

Mental health nurse education in not sufficiently critical of institutional psychiatric practice. Its formal curricula in universities are often undermined by the informal curricula of practice environments. As an institution, mental health nursing pays insufficient attention to both these issues because it is an arguably un-reflexive and rule-following discipline.

Our success as a movement depends on our ability to sway the general public—and if the mainstream press and media never afford our books their due—not even the blatantly cutting edge ones (and if anything, these are treated worse) and the general public, as a consequence, remains largely unaware of their existence, the likelihood of succeeding in our primary mission(s) is substantially reduced.

In my last two posts, Back in the Dark House Again: The Recurrent Nature of Clinical Depression and Am I Having a Breakdown or Breakthrough? Further Reflections on a Depressive Relapse, I have shared my recent relapse into depression. Although it has been tough, when I wake up each morning I am grateful for one thing — I am not suicidal. Others are not as fortunate.

I want to keep urging people to move toward the entrepreneurial approaches, because I think they are very powerful and not well understood or trusted in our community. I have chosen to build a business because I think it's one of the best ways I can impact on our world. After looking at the results of different types of advocacy work, this is the pressure point I've found most likely to make a difference.

I believe that Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman, the past president of the American Psychiatric Association must judge some writers and commenters here on MIA as being “anti-science” and “anarchists.” He has now published at least two articles that, in essence, suggest that critics of the DSM-5 and psychiatry should be silenced.

There is a great deal of discussion about youth being diagnosed - by general internists as well as psychiatrists - with ADHD, bipolar disorder, autism, irritability and depression and then joining the ranks of the pathologized and overmedicated on a march towards long-term distress. Less attention has been paid to the 27 million children who, covered by federal and state Medicaid programs, are at high risk due to dangerous mismanagement of second-generation anti-psychotic drugs (SGAs). Recent reports have documented the brutal facts.

I have just attended the 17th International Conference on the Treatment of Psychosis in Tornio, Finland. I am full of thoughts and I keep trying to figure out how I will explain this meeting to others.

Today I paid a visit to the Managing Director of Mylan Pharmaceuticals, Lloyd Price. Mylan is the company that manufactured the antidepressant Fluox1 which, according to the NZ government, is the most likely cause of my son's suicide. My dealings with Mylan in the time since Toran died have not been entirely fruitful.

Equating pain with promise may sound strange, and even uncaring, to all who experience it — especially to a significant, chronic degree. To clarify, I am not minimizing the horror that pain is for millions of people, and the need to provide compassionate care for those whose pain negatively affects their lives. But I firmly believe that for almost all of us, pain is a mechanism that exists for many reasons — it is not something we should necessarily attempt to extinguish without first giving adequate consideration to the messages that it may be sending. Doing so not only further jeopardizes our well-being. It may also prevent us from realizing a richer, more meaningful, grateful course than we ever imagined.

In February of 2014, in the Journal of Experimental Psychology (General), Eddie Brummelman and colleagues published an article that revisited the subject of praise for youth.  For decades, praise and positive reinforcement had been hailed by mental health professionals as the antidote to many of our youth’s problems.  Parents regularly heard the message that there was no such thing as “bad praise.”  But as the research began to evolve, some began to question this notion.

"From years of personal and professional experience, I must tell you my biggest fear is that we’re massively misunderstanding the emotional and mental suffering of children and teens. We’ve taken their feelings, thoughts and suffering and transformed them into symptoms, diagnoses, reductive theories and then prescribing them an array of psychiatric drugs with dire short- and long-term consequences. We’re drugging their emotions, their thinking and their quest for meaning into disabling silence."

After talking for awhile about big pharma corruption, the distortion of research and academic psychiatry, and the overselling of psychiatric medications a bright social work intern who has been on our team for about six months pointedly asked me, “So, do you enjoy helping people by prescribing medications or by helping them in other ways?” I had to pause for a moment to think about it. “I don’t enjoy prescribing as much as I used to.”

The serotonin reuptake inhibiting (SSRI) group of drugs came on stream in the late 1980s, nearly two decades after first being mooted. The delay centred on finding an indication. They did not have hoped-for lucrative antihypertensive or antiobesity profiles. Even though a 1960s idea that serotonin concentrations might be lowered in depression had been rejected, drug companies marketed SSRIs for depression even though they were weaker than older tricyclic antidepressants. They sold the idea that depression was the deeper illness behind the superficial manifestations of anxiety. The approach was an astonishing success, central to which was the notion that SSRIs restored serotonin levels to normal, a notion that later transmuted into the idea that they remedied a chemical imbalance.

Chinese medicine offers one proven path to emotional balance and harmony for many people who struggle with anxiety or depression. Many people who receive treatment from a licensed acupuncturist experience significant benefit, and don’t need to take psychiatric drugs.

There are more and more of us who are determined to build an international movement that doesn’t forget its history, and that reweaves solidarity and community back into a model of mental and emotional and spiritual health. The system we live under is organized to keep a small number of people in control of the rest of us. Those who don’t fit into the model are drugged and silenced. We — the Mad Ones, the ones who have no choice but to feel the suffering of this planet and the people on it — we have a responsibility to create a new world that can hold our visions and brilliance. We have a responsibility to know our own histories of oppression and resistance. We carry with us the memories of the dead, the tortured, the exiled, and the ones whose flames can never be extinguished.

Herbs are medicine just like food is medicine really . . . this is Mamma Earth in action. Mamma Earth will nurture all your needs in a most beautiful and gentle way. We need to learn to listen. And just like a good diet when it comes to food, medicinal herbs should not be eaten every single day ad infinitum. Variety and moderation is important in all things. Right timing is also important. Learning to intuitively understand the body and its needs is important. I actually woke up this morning thinking I’d arrived. I’m well . . . even if still sick in some regards.

Disclosure is an insufficient strategy for mitigating bias because bias does not result from the concealment of financial ties but from their effects. Even worse, social psychologists have demonstrated that when individuals disclose a competing interest, they give even more biased advice.

Massachusetts Bill HD 4554 needs to gain sufficient state representative support by Tuesday, March 1, 2016. This bill will put restrictions on the prescribing of benzodiazepines and non-benzodiazepine sleep aids, and will require that all patients be informed of the potential dangers of these drugs, specifically the dangers of long-term use.

Today, Saturday, 16 May 2015, a protest was held in Eugene against human rights violations caused by the use of electroshock, a psychiatric procedure involving the running of electricity through the brain. The protest today was one of about two dozen held in about eight countries.