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After each highly publicized gun violence incident, some lawmakers—whether with good intention, for political gain, or both—declare that we must have laws to keep guns out of the hands of people with mental illness. It is therefore stunning and profoundly important to note Sunday's blog post from the American Psychiatric Association's president, Dr. Renee Binder.

The joint ISEPP/UCLA conference was held in Los Angeles on November 14-16, 2014. Today, ISEPP and the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs are delighted to bring you videos of 13 of the 15 invited plenary talks. Each video is accompanied by a crisply written interview with the speaker, focusing on the goals of their work, challenges facing their profession, and how they evaluate any salient changes in mental health practice and research. These smartly produced and edited videos range from 20 to 30 minutes in length and are freely available on www.TransformingMadScience.com

Integration of physical and "mental health" care has been a popular topic in psychiatric circles in recent years. I've never been entirely clear about the nature of this proposed integration of psychiatry with primary care, though from what I've gathered, it sounds like there will be a psychiatrist, or other mental health worker, attached to primary care practices, either in the flesh or via computer screens. What has always been crystal clear, however, is that the proposal would entail a huge expansion of the psychiatric net.

The controversy over “Study 329” on the effects of Paxil in teen depression has raised questions about the state of ALL medical research. I decided to look at the research for the most recent psychiatric drug approved by the FDA, a new antipsychotic called cariprazine or Vraylar.  I located twenty studies of Vraylar on www.ClinicalTrials.gov, the U.S. government-sponsored registry for clinical trials.  Three were still in process, and seventeen were completed.  Not one had shared its results on the government website, a supposedly mandatory step.

In reviewing the classes I took in graduate school, nowhere was I taught that mental disorders are an illness arising from a chemical imbalance which needs to be treated with medication. If my university professors did not teach it, then where did I learn it? The answer lies in working in the field itself and hearing it from supervisors and other colleagues. But where did they learn it? Why do we to continue to blindly go along without questioning whether or not any of this makes sense or is helpful? We need to do better.

Psychiatry, at large, is coming under correction after decades of collusion with industry and media. Yes, those “healers of the soul” (can you believe that’s what the original meaning of psychiatrist actually derives from?) have to begin to take responsibility for their part in overdiagnosis and overtreatment of vast swaths of the population. What has been less explored is the collusive role of the media in generating public beliefs about mental illness and its best treatment.

This thought-provoking reflective checklist strategy is designed to challenge the increasing 'quick fix' mentality of many doctors who decide to move immediately from a possible diagnosis to medication. With school-aged children we need to promote their Safeguarding, and a Pause-Reflect-Review process that will, hopefully, reduce unnecessary prescribing.

A screenshot of the Facebook of the Oregon shooter, taken by a colleague of mine before the site was taken down, has the following comment from the shooter: “Chris Harper Mercer, August 16: I have a pill bottle with like five types of pills mixed in. I don’t know which ones are the sleep aids, so I just took four of each.” Once again, we have a shooter who has been through the “mental health” system and has probably been taking drugs.

Benzodiazepines may be the most popular, widely used, and immediately effective of all the psychiatric drugs. At the same time they are perhaps one of the most dangerous, addictive, and abused mind-altering substances on the planet. Since the 1980’s psychiatry and their partners in the pharmaceutical industry have spent billions of dollars marketing these drugs and justifying their efficacy in the “treatment” of anxiety and insomnia. Psychiatry has been able to create a patient base of millions of people who are dependent on these drugs and are forced to remain “co-dependent” customers of psychiatrists and other medical doctors in order to procure them.

Recent calls for screening for a range of mental health problems point to an important recognition of the need to identify and address emotional suffering. Such screening offers an opportunity to decrease the stigma and shame that often accompany emotional pain. A powerful new documentary, The Dark Side of the Full Moon, calls attention to the under-recognition and under-treatment of postpartum depression. In one scene, a mother refers to resistance from doctors who lack resources to address positive screens as "absurd.” She is correct, if the alternative to screening is to look the other way in the face of women who are suffering.

In July, 2015 an article was published in the ^{New York Times Magazine} about a pair of male Colombian MZ twins (monozygotic, identical), where one member had been accidentally switched at birth with the member of another MZ pair. Historically, the ^Times and other mainstream (corporate) media outlets have reported on genetic and biological theories of human behavioral differences from the perspective that these influences are important, usually quoting the statements of scientists and twin researchers who promote these positions, while largely ignoring the views of their critics. The genetic determinist theories they often promote coincide with the interests of the economically and politically powerful sections of American society (including the drug companies), who finance and promote the research.

I think it is indeed true that many people go to psychiatrists specifically to get drugs. This is because it is widely known that psychiatrists will prescribe psychiatric drugs readily. In fact, since about 1980 or so, they really don't do much of anything else. For most psychiatrists, a "patient" returning at regular intervals for "med-checks" and refills is the ideal scenario. Within the psychiatric community, there is, I think, a great deal more concern expressed about non-compliant "patients" than there is about those who adhere faithfully to the prescription and keep coming back for more.

When I was twenty-eight, I had what is commonly referred to as a “psychotic break.” It was nothing like what I would’ve imagined, given the cultural stereotypes. It was not in the least nonsensical. There was an exacting inner logic and meaning. Twenty-two years later, I continue to believe in the harrowing greatness of what my younger self went through.

'How to Touch a Hot Stove' (the centerpiece of what is being called 'The Hot Stove Project') is a film that professes to be about a new civil rights movement. It employs interview clips from a wide array of 'big names' on all sides of the 'mental health' world, in a purported effort to compare and contrast the many voices that lay claim to that concept. In fact, the filmmakers did a fairly good job of writing about a film that would surely have stood out in a sea of chemically imbalanced cinema. Unfortunately, the film they wrote about is not the film they made.

There is a hunger out there for a foundational critique of psychiatry—something that pulls no punches, minces no words. That is, there is a hunger for a reasoned antipsychiatry position. Something that explains how we ended up here, provides solid evidence that psychiatry should be abandoned, and begins theorizing what we might do instead.

Good Pharma is the story of the Mario Negri Institute. Mario Negri was a wealthy patron who on his death in 1960 bequeathed a large sum of money to support independent pharmaceutical research to an upcoming researcher Silvio Garattini. Garattini and Alfredo Leonardi set about building an Institute centred on the new drugs and new techniques. They continue to grow without ever having patented any of their many discoveries or concealing any of the data from experiments that didn’t work out or accommodating any of their trials to industry’s wishes.

I am humbled to share with you my life’s journey, and more importantly to convey a recent experience that has transmuted everything, opening up a new frontier of being more fully alive. I am beginning to see the invisible; or should I say I am beginning to feel it, because it is an inner experience.

The current view of mental illness and its accessory idea, mental health, were born of the Enlightenment. Formerly, spiritual ailments had been considered sins or heresies. They were allegedly produced by the diabolical interventions of witches, Satan, and/or Jews, and confessors relied on prayer or holy water to remedy the soul. With the decline of Christianity in Europe, those ailments were reinterpreted in secular (mechanistic, atomistic, materialist) terms that reduced the self to its molecular substructure. The mind became equated with the brain, and remedies naturally became mechanical or chemical—insulin shock, lobotomy, electroshock, surgery, and drugs.

Global leaders in the critical psychiatry movement met on 18 Sep 2015 for a one-day conference to address an urgent public health issue: the iatrogenic harm caused by the over-prescription of psychiatric medications. We were treated to an expert review of the ways in which the widespread use of harmful and barely (if at all) helpful medicines has become the mainstay of psychiatry’s contribution to society. At gatherings such as this, when people discover I am a psychiatrist I often become a lightning rod for their anger and frustration. It’s okay; it comes with the job, but a couple of things happened at Roehampton which reminded me why this can happen, and why all of this is so much more complicated than the simple black-and-white “Pharma and psychiatry bad, everyone else good.”

I just wanted to do a brief followup on my last blog post about my latest psychotic break adventure. I am a recent Psychonaut exploring the inner workings of the mind, and finding out what was my reality versus Consensus reality. I am starting to come out of the experience. It is like waking from a dream. Questioning one's self is a standard part of this process of coming back to consensus reality — at least for me. It's good to reconsider some of the conclusions I've come to in the last month or so, when some of my inputs may have not been a part of consensus reality. But I'm getting stronger.

I was recently surfing the internet and came across an Etsy ad selling a lobotomy tool set - hammer and orbitoclast. I was tempted to make the purchase and indulge my penchant for this historical “apparatus” especially given its rise as heroic therapeutic intervention for three decades. It was a mere $168.00. Although I didn’t buy the historical torture device, that ad left me with one penetrating realization: psychiatry is here to stay.

While the following list of political abuses of U.S. psychiatry and psychology begins with the infamous Project MKUltra and recent American Psychological Association torture scandal, this should not be taken to imply that these more sensational abuses are the more important than the everyday political abuse of U.S. psychiatry and psychology to stigmatize and disempower groups, enable dehumanizing institutions, compel compliance, marginalize dissent, depoliticize, and maintain the status quo.

It can be difficult to pinpoint transitions. The Rubicon that led from a Medical Republic to a Pharmaceutical Empire was crossed in 1962 with the passage of the Amendments to the Food and Drugs Act. This act put in place an apparatus of controlled trials, prescription-only status and disease indications that laid the basis for a global pharmaceutical hegemony, although the drift to Empire could still have been stopped at this point.

In a Sunday newspaper in 2001, Mary read an article entitled ‘The Doctor, who won’t do Drugs.' It was written to mark the publication of a new book ‘Beyond Prozac’ by Limerick-based Dr. Terry Lynch. In our co-authored book, ‘Soul Survivor - A Personal Encounter with Psychiatry’, Mary describes her first meeting with Terry. “I was so inspired and encouraged by the article and the book that I wanted to thank him personally. I managed to locate his phone number and spoke to him for the first time. I subsequently met him a number of times and the enthusiasm and sincerity of the man were like a good tonic. From the word go, he believed in me as a survivor just as much as I believed in him as a professional and above all as a good thinker, someone who didn’t take things at face value and had the courage of his convictions. He listened to me, encouraged me and his great understanding of the psychiatric system greatly helped me."

Let’s face it, as our kids slowly developing brains wrestle with behavioral and maturity issues while also trying to juggle expectations related to academic and social challenges, some of the behaviors they display can be quite concerning. Understandably, after trying what seems like everything in the books plus the kitchen, bathroom and laundry room sinks, caring and often exhausted parents are actively looking for help, resources and answers. But guess what? Without any need for pharmaceutical intervention or “drug therapy,” for centuries parents have been quite capable of helping challenged children overcome semi-annoying and concerning behaviors that some “experts” want to label today as symptoms of a mental disorder. Behaviors that a billion kids worldwide display every day.