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Many people are now familiar with the BPS report, Understanding Psychosis and Schizophrenia, and they have appreciated how it integrates both science and a humanistic understanding to convey a fresh and progressive approach to difficult and extreme experiences. But it has come under attack by psychiatrists, using arguments that are often quite slick, and sound reasonable to the uninformed. But they are wrong, and the better we can articulate how and why they are wrong, the better we can advocate for a more humane and skillful response to people having the experiences that are called “psychosis.”

Cultural psychiatry provides a robust critique of a biologically orientated psychiatry. All cultures divide the world up into normal and abnormal; all have some notion of madness, but the idioms used to describe these states and the causes behind them can only ever be understood in the full context of the culture where they take place. It suggests that the very categories which are assumed to be natural occurring forms, are in fact just social and cultural constructions.

In my practice as a therapist I often work with people who have been seriously hurt by the practice of psychiatry, either directly or indirectly through family members. Many of them started taking psychiatric drugs for moderate depression, or for some anxiety, or for panic attacks. But as time went on, their doses went up. The sad part about this common story is that when the person finally decides that the psych drugs have caused deep harm, and that they want to stop, the road towards coming off these drugs is long and arduous, and there is little cultural support.

What do you when medications for your emotional problems become worse than the problems themselves? Laura Delano went to a psychiatrist at age 18, and for the next decade was prescribed nineteen different psychiatric drugs. After devastating physical and emotional effects, she began a journey to become medication free -- and re-discover who she is.

Probiotics have certainly become quite the rage across the world for the treatment of all kinds of ailments from irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) to infectious diarrhoea to stress to low mood. Some might say that the enthusiasm has been rather slow to develop. Recently, the popular press has propagated the idea that probiotics are the next antidepressants.

Years ago, a psychiatrist by the name of Theodore Lidz published a book entitled Schizophrenia and the Family.  Unlike many others of his time, he believed that schizophrenic symptoms were not necessarily the result of an underlying disease, but could be caused by dysfunctional parental behavior.  He noted that significant conflict and high levels of tension were not necessarily the cause of symptoms; in certain families, a pattern of “skewed” communication existed in which odd, often unhealthy patterns of interaction and behaviors were allowed and even supported by one spouse, which resulted in a confusing, distorted environment for the children.

It takes courage and integrity to make changes to your beliefs and approach. In 2008 Professor Roger Mulder, head of psychiatry at Otago University, published research in which he concluded “Antidepressant treatment is associated with a rapid and significant reduction in suicidal behaviours. The rate of emergent suicidal behaviour was low and the risk/benefit ratio for antidepressants appears to favour their use.” In Dr. Mulder's conference presentations last week, he stated that the medical/psychiatric paradigm that has dominated approaches to suicide since WWII has largely failed to influence suicide rates. In Dr. Mulder’s view “New approaches are required – possibly public health, sociological, community or combinations in addition to, or instead of, medical approaches.”

In the wake of yet another national uproar about a mass shooting, much of the public once again turns its eye towards supposed mental health reform as the solution to the atrocity of acts of gun violence carried out in public spaces by primarily young, white men. The issue of gun control has soared back up to the top of concerns being addressed by presidential candidates, and national discourse has fallen back into its routine, polarized stances. The Republican leadership continues to suggest that gun control is not the solution — there must be something wrong with “those people’s” brains.

We are seeing an increasing cycle of high-profile media stories linking an act of random multiple shooting to an allegation that the perpetrator is "mentally ill." We have to understand that it is nothing more than a libel. It cannot be debated rationally, and every time we have tried to point out the the absence of evidence for a statistical linkage, these rational arguments have no effect; instead they almost seem to add fuel to the fire. I want to point out something about how profiling works and why it is always wrong.

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.

The long-running debate on the validity of twin research recently resurfaced in American criminology, and has major implications for behavioral and medical twin research. Most twin researchers and their critics agree that reared-together monozygotic (MZ) twin pairs experience more similar environments than experienced by same-sex dizygotic (DZ) pairs, and we argue that the twin method is therefore unable to disentangle the potential influences of genes and environment on human behavioral differences, a conclusion supported by the failures of molecular genetic research.

Oppression and abuse have effects on a person's sense of self and experience of agency, or lack thereof; on one's ability to know one's self in the world as actor, and not only acted-upon. Some (and maybe all) aspects of oppression and abuse specifically entail moral injury and violation of moral integrity. This is particularly interesting to explore because it links psychological trauma as a result of oppression and abuse with an aspect of decision-making difficulty that some of us experience as psychiatrically-labeled people. There is something to be gained by reclaiming ownership of the truths of our own lives, and ownership over making decisions about where to take the discussion: in philosophy, psychology, law, politics, art or anywhere else.

The American Association of Suicidology (AAS) has created a blog for suicide attempt survivors. By seeking out and actually welcoming the survivor voice, for the first time anywhere in the world by a mainstream suicide organisation, this represents a global breakthrough in the field.

This has got to stop. Around the world a million people die from suicide each year and the response internationally is to pour more funding and channel more people into psychiatric services. Three large studies have now found that the more we spend on mental health services the higher our suicide rates. In addition, a recent study has completely discredited claims that 90% of those who die from suicide are mentally ill at the time of their death. We need to use this evidence to stop the expansion of psychiatry as a suicide prevention measure.

What would happen if professionals opened their minds about the nature of madness?  What new possibilities might be created if they questioned labels such...

I just attended my first American Psychiatric Association (APA) meeting even though it has been going for 168 years. I was invited to join a symposium on vitamin-mineral combinations as primary treatment of psychiatric symptoms. There was one talk I decided to attend, not because I was particularly interested in the topic, but because it would give me an opportunity to ask Jeffrey Lieberman a question.

My public writing has brought my mother and I closer together than we’ve been in decades. There have been disagreements. But now, my almost ninety-year-old mother tells me she reads everything I write. She recently told me that she’s glad I see things so clearly.

Three weeks have passed since Mad in America’s International Film Festival took place at the Regent Theatre in Arlington, Massachusetts, USA. I’ve been spending a lot of time in solitude, reflecting and processing the whole thing, for in the Festival’s wake, I was taken over by a powerful, albeit interesting mix of great physical and mental fatigue and even greater emotional energy. Most importantly, what the Festival has set off in me is a resurgence of hope—hope for Mad in America’s future as an organization and an ever-growing space for people to come together in community, hope for this mission we’re on to transform the way the world makes sense of the experiences that get called “mental illness”, and hope in our collective human capacity for personal and collective transformation.

My mother was once a bright, creative, beautiful young woman, a promising artist and a poet, who was captivated by the hippie movement. She was a creative bohemian artist, defying the conventions of our middle-class Jewish Midwestern family, which had carried a tradition of holding emotions inside and acting stoic. One day, soon after my grandparents’ divorce, she left. She hitched a ride to California, and from that point on, was never the same. The police picked her up on a park bench in Arizona, and she was committed for the first time at age 18. She rotated in and out of mental hospitals, the streets, and jail until her death.

As I write this, the New York Times is asking readers to respond to the question “What should be done to prevent mass shootings?” The more responses the New York Times receives from people who understand that the answer is gun control — not misguided legislation that would only harm those it purports to help — the more they will take notice. Please write!

I imagine that everybody on this side of the issue knows by now that the eminent psychiatrist Jeffrey Lieberman, MD, Chief Psychiatrist at Columbia, and past President of the APA, called Robert Whitaker "a menace to society." The grounds for Dr. Lieberman's vituperation were that Robert had dared to challenge some of psychiatry's most sacred tenets! But in all the furor, it was largely ignored that in the same interview Dr. Lieberman had said something else that warrants additional discussion.

This week, JAMA Internal Medicine published online an interesting paper, “Cumulative Use of Strong Anticholinergics and Incident Dementia: A Prospective Cohort Study.” They found that exposure to anticholinergic drugs significantly increased the risk of developing dementia. This study has important implications for those who prescribe and take psychiatric drugs.

I am quarantined in Stabilization. In front of me an old woman with cherry lipstick and a clipboard asks questions about sexual abuse, but my mind is through the square window on the door behind her. In that room I see a steel bed surrounded by emptiness. On top of it lay leather straps that are uneven in width where they’re wearing thin. Each strap has a set of holes to fasten the buckles tight, and I can see quite clearly that the ones nearest the end are circles while the ones furthest away have stretched into ovals. Tonight will be a Haldol night.

It is not the responsibility of those exposed to demonstrate danger, it is the responsibility of pharmaceutical, commercial, and industrial companies to properly evaluate the long-term safety of such exposures, including an evaluation of the severe risks to a potentially genetically vulnerable minority. Only then can a governing body be in a position to sanction, condone, or even promote such chemicals.

I was a psychiatrist who participated in the Recovery After an Initial Schizophrenia Episode Early Treatment Program (RAISE ETP). Although I welcomed the positive headlines that heralded the study's results, the reports left me with mixed feelings. What happened to render the notion that talking to people about their experiences and helping them find jobs or go back to school is something novel?