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Doctors in the 1950s and 1960s made psychiatric diagnoses on orphaned children that led to treatment with antipsychotic drugs, and one of the drivers of this seemed to be that the Church got more money from the State as a result. The doctors, of course, also got paid. This feels like a seriously corrupt nexus operating with near impunity on the basis that no one is going to be bothered to investigate the fate of some orphans.

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.

Our "friends" at NAMI Ohio took the occasion of so-called "Mental Illness Awareness Week" to try and drum up support for their efforts to loosen criteria for involuntary outpatient commitment (IOC) laws in Ohio. I would encourage those interested, particularly those in Ohio, to contact Ohio legislators as NAMI suggests; but to encourage them to vote DOWN any changes to the current law. Remind them that anosognosia is deliberately being mis-applied...

John Foppes had been born with no arms, among a number of other serious congenital abnormalities.  Doctors questioned whether he would survive at all.  In his deeply motivating book, “What’s Your Excuse?  Making the Most Out of What You Have,” John describes his life of growing up with no arms into one of full independence, and his feelings of stigmatization and isolation even in the midst of support from others.  In the depths of his struggle, John also notes evident gratitude in what most perceived as a very unfair situation. 

Imagine if we, as a society, started recognizing trauma, pain, grief, fear, the need for connection and understanding, and oppression without defensiveness or denial. What if, hypothetically, we saw the signs in people who were "defiant," "withdrawn," "oppositional," "depressed," "manic," or otherwise as desperate pleas to have their needs met, and stopped telling them they were sick for doing so? What would a society that actually encouraged expression of emotion, compassion, and empathy look like?

It's too bad, of course, that our state and federal regulators can't seem to muster the political will to require the marketing and prescribing of safer opiate painkillers. Indeed, the federal Department of Health and Human Services could ensure that Medicare and Medicaid include agonist-antagonist drugs in their drug formularies and save many lives in one bold sweep. But until the feds get their act together -- are you listening, President Obama? -- it's up to the families who have lost loves ones to prescription drug overdoses to sue the drug makers and force change.

Ever since I had realized how I had been so terribly wounded in my life, I had wanted to tell psychiatry they were wrong about me. For me, the Occupy Psychiatry protest in Philadelphia last May 5 was a great opportunity to do that. It's not possible for everyone in the world who is interested in psychiatric human rights to attend the May 19 protest and rally in San Francisco that is being held by Occupy Psychiatry, but there are millions of people who want (need) to see a change and activism can take any number of forms.

When we look closely at the current mainstream diagnostic and support system for so-called mental disorders today, the utter absurdity of it quickly becomes apparent. We have a system composed of literally hundreds of discrete “mental disorders” (those listed in the DSM), all of which are believed to be the direct result of soon to be discovered brain diseases, in spite of the fact no reliable biomarkers have yet been found for any of them after a century of intense searching, a fact acknowledged just last month by the current designer-in-chief of this system himself.

Dr. Torrey accuses me of being ignorant and perhaps in this regard he is correct. Where he sees such clarity, I see profoundly difficult questions.

I just learned that Dr. Martin Keller, principal investigator of the controversial Paxil study 329, has retired from his position as a professor of...

There is indeed a crisis in the mental health business. The crisis derives from psychiatry's spurious and self-serving premise that all significant problems of thinking, feeling, and/or behaving are brain illnesses that are correctable by psychiatric drugs.

Our priorities for studying and improving "mental health" are way out of whack. They have been for a long time. For the past 30 years, the National Institute for Mental Health has been spending most of its gigantic budget ($1.3 billion in 2015) on studying the brain and looking for the genes that cause "mental illness." That's been a tremendous waste of money, time and effort.

We would, in fact, save vast amounts of money by giving the pharmaceutical companies ten times the inflated prices they currently receive for drugs as part of a bargain that ensures only 10% of those currently taking lipid-lowering drugs, antidepressants, biphosphonate and other drugs end up on them. The savings would come from not having to treat treatment-induced disabilities.

Antidepressants may be effective over the short term, but research is showing that treatment resistant depression has risen dramatically in the past 30 years; evidence that the drugs may be inducing chronic depression.

From time to time, I find myself feeling the urge to articulate my views and delineate them from people with whom I may be identified. Rightly or wrongly, I feel that way with this website. Although the goal is to have wide ranging goals there is nevertheless a distinct perspective represented here. I feel the urge to articulate where I part ways with some of the views expressed here. I do this in the spirit of discourse. I am not certain I am correct. I may someday change my mind. I am just expressing my perspective.

I have been creating graphics to explain some of the work we do. Infographics have a lot of power. This one is a rough...

There's a widespread belief in psychiatric and mental health circles that human experience can be reduced to the biology of brain chemistry -- the "medical model." But this is just the tip of the iceberg: our whole society is in the grips of a faddish pseudo-science of "neuromarketing," "neuropolitics" "neurotheology," and 'neuroeconomics."

Just so we are clear, on page 61 of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), the "creators" of the diagnosis for ADHD admit there is no test sensitive or specific enough to actually diagnose ADHD. Given that the Drug Company-funded "experts" in charge of writing the ADHD diagnosis for the APA admit there is no test capable of diagnosing ADHD, nor are there any biological markers or brain scans capable of serving as a diagnostic, how can they diagnose 6.5 million kids with ADHD?

Psychiatric molecular genetic research has failed to discover genes that underlie the major psychiatric disorders, the existence of which twin and adoption studies are assumed to have established. "Genome-wide complex trait analysis" (GCTA) was developed a few years ago as a means of solving what researchers call the "missing heritability" problem. One researcher believed that the new GCTA method would “drive a stake through the heart of” criticism of behavioral genetic theories and methods, and would finally put criticism of twin studies “to rest.” The opposite scenario appears to be playing out, however, as leading behavioral genetic and psychiatric genetic researchers struggle to prevent some recent negative GCTA findings and the obvious false assumptions underlying twin research from driving a stake through the heart of twin studies themselves.

Are colleges unrealistic in their demands academically, or are we failing to equip our children with the tools they need to live mentally and emotionally healthy lives? I’m leaning toward the latter. We need to provide more support for today’s college students and raise awareness that mental and emotional distress is not something one should suffer alone. It is our responsibility as a society to prepare our kids for life.

A month ago, I published a critique of specific terminology of DSM-5.  Like countless others, I have serious concerns about the overpathologizing of normal behaviors that appears to be occurring over the past few decades.  The potential consequences of this trend have been widely articulated in many circles, and have raised a serious question, “What is normal?” But while this has been occurring in both psychiatric and lay arenas, another movement has been gaining significant support.  It is the idea that mental illness (or disease) is a fabrication, and as Sera Davidow quoted E. Fuller Torrey in her recent moving article, “Mental illness does not exist, and neither does mental health.”

In the mainstream, psychological difficulties are seen as “symptoms” of an “illness” or “mental disorder” and based on this the focus is put on suppressing them, either by using drugs, or shock, or by psychological interventions that also aim to “eliminate the problem.” Unfortunately, this mainstream approach often works poorly, and too often its main effect is to aggravate the problem, or to cause “collateral damage” as critically important parts of the person are suppressed along with the supposed “symptoms.” But if we want to replace the mainstream approach, we need a coherent alternative view.

I’ve given the “the speech” hundreds of times to skeptical young people, to frightened families and to many homeless men and women. I’ve assured them all that “mental illness is like diabetes and your medications are like insulin.” I delivered this speech with all good intentions and unquestioned certainty of its veracity and helpfulness. I really bought the whole chemical imbalance narrative — hook, line and Seroquel.

I worked as an IHS psychologist from 2000 to 2004 and personally witnessed disturbing practices all around me at that time. I’ll likely hark back to encounters with those IHS dysfunctions from time to time on this blog, but I want to make an important point right away with respect to understanding at least some of them: Follow the money.

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.