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A growing body of evidence indicates that forced “treatment” in today’s mental health system, including all forms of forced hospitalization and forced drugging, may actually cause FAR more harm than good. Recent published studies and articles point towards evidence of physical and psychological harm that, in some cases, may contribute to more suicidality and patient deaths, as well as overall worse outcomes in a person’s state of recovery.

If a person in mid-life is feeling anxious, or depressed, or can't sleep? No problem. No need to figure out the source of these concerns. No need to work towards solutions in the old time-honored way of our ancestors. Today, psychiatrists have pills. Pop a benzo! And by the way, you'll have a 40% increased risk of Alzheimer's Disease in your late sixties.

Before entering the field of psychology in the 1970s, I worked as a psychiatric nurse, gravitating to the community mental health movement, and then to anti-psychiatry politics. As a nurse at a psychiatric hospital in Santa Monica, also involved in union organizing and direct action politics with a feminist health collective, I was drawn to the radical wing of community mental health. Decades later, in producing a documentary film on the stories of people who entered the state psychiatric hospital in Oregon under the insanity plea, I had the chance to look back on that era through the lens of a fiction film that had made this hospital so famous.

When my son was born six years ago, the word “disabled” was suddenly all around me. It came from everywhere – the nurses, the doctors, the physical and occupational therapists, friends and family. I remember looking into his ice blue eyes and so marveling at the lines of white that extended so symmetrically from his irises that I began calling him Star Boy. I felt a new mother’s sense of protection. The label surrounding my Star Boy was a smoke so thick I felt I could barely breathe.

For all who suffer, meaning must first come through survival.  But at some point, a question emerges about whether distress and misery mean more than the pain one feels.  An inquiry of transcendence appears.  In one study of those affected by severe childhood trauma, those who survive are able to find a way through each day that comes, but past trauma still exerts significant control over their life.  But with those who transcend, there is a sense of rising above the ordinary physical and psychological state.  Although traumatic experiences themselves may remain as definitive and directive circumstances in a person’s life, transcendence provides an escape to a more meaningful, and often joyful existence.

I was honored to both attend and participate in the recent Mad In America Film Festival. I was asked to join a panel of psychiatrists who were asked to respond to the themes and questions explored in the festival. What follows are a lightly edited version of my remarks.

Eighteen years ago, in the fall of 1996, I plunged into a major depression that almost killed me. Over the next eighteen years I took what I had learned in my healing and put together a mental health recovery program which I taught through my books, support groups and long distance telephone coaching. In the process, I counseled many people who were in the same desperate straights that I had been in. I shared with them what I had learned through my ordeal---that if you set the intention to heal, reach out for support, and use a combination of mutually supportive therapies to treat your symptoms, you will make it through this. And in the cases where people used these strategies and hung there, they eventually were able, like myself, to emerge from the hell of depression.

What should the relational and emotional stance of the therapist be? Just who exactly is the therapist in relationship to the person coming to see the therapist? What is the therapist's job, exactly? What should the therapist's disposition be toward the person sitting across from them? What kinds of assumptions or presumed power come with the label therapist and are those assumptions harmful or helpful?

Electric shock "treatment" is no more effective than sham ECT, in which the client is prepared and anaesthetized, but not actually shocked. When one considers the pains to which real doctors go to protect their patients from seizures, I suggest that the deliberate induction of grand mal seizures, often involuntarily, constitutes neither "a remarkable discovery" nor a "remarkable medical advance," but rather aggravated assault by a person in a position of trust.

Whistle Blown. On October 5th, 2014, I began an indefinite duration Hunger Strike upon the State of Colorado. I'm doing this because I have hard evidence of a pattern of plea coercion and child abuse coverup at Boulder County Mental Health Center, Inc. in the form of a wire recording of one of their employees, Dan Shearer.

I spent 15 years slowly preparing for a trip into the unfaceable, in large part by observing an American human rights advocate and coalition builder (who has German heritage) do gut-wrenching emotional healing work particularly related to her internalized anti-Semitism and her internalized white racism. She inspired me with her intelligence, tenacity and determination to be free from the damaging effects of these forms of oppressions. Many of her family members supported the Nazies.

"What is Wrong With You?" is the question many of us are faced with when we seek understanding or assistance while navigating life’s challenges. But it is known that survival skills learned in our youth - often in order to weather difficult situations we have faced - often do not transfer in a healthy way into adulthood. In many cases these previously adaptive behaviors become problematic, then end up pathologized and diagnosed. "What Happened to You?" is a documentary film that explores the proven fact that events experienced while growing up have a cause & effect relationship on our later lives.

I worked for ten-and-a-half years as a psychotherapist, nine of them licensed and one-and-a-half as a social work intern. For the last four years I have worked as a filmmaker. I have considered of late turning in my therapy license (an LCSW), and, if I were to return to the psychological helping profession, to do so as a life coach—unlicensed and outside the system. But is this wise?

In the west the almighty “professional” is the guru. The educated “expert,” in general, takes on many different guises but we are systematically taught not to trust ourselves and to, instead, submit to the expert opinions of people who do not know us and who, all too often, believe they know far more than they actually do. The party line in mental health care is that we should find a professional for just about everything. What happens if an appropriate professional is not available? The reality on the ground is that is often the case as much as we’d like to think otherwise.

Two years ago, when I first felt the dizzy confusion of benzo disability, I talked about it openly. I remember discussing it briefly with an older friend who found my plight strangely fascinating. He asked if I remembered Quaaludes, a sedative-hypnotic that was all the rage in the 1960s and ‘70s. “We called them ‘Stumble Biscuits,’” he told me, “because you’d stumble down the street and hit one car and then stumble over and hit something else and it was just happy and goofy. It’s too bad they took them off the market. Those things were great.”

Why do people readily accept the data showing that nutrients are good for our hearts, and for prevention and (now perhaps) treatment of cancer . . . but they find it so hard to accept the use of nutrients to make us feel better mentally?

On August 15, 2014, McGill-Queens University Press published Psychiatry Disrupted: Theorizing Resistance and Crafting the (R)evolution.  The work is a collection of papers by various authors, edited by Bonnie Burstow, Brenda A. LeFrançois, and Shaindl Diamond.  There is a Foreword by Paula Caplan, and a Preface by Kate Millett. It is no secret that there is growing opposition to psychiatry.  No longer marginalized and ignored, as in former decades, anti-psychiatry writers are proclaiming psychiatry's spurious and destructive nature in a wide range of venues.  Even the mainstream media is taking tentative steps in our direction.

Over the decades, I have had the good fortune to be immersed in what many of us call Mad Culture. In various cities, at a number of events, there would be a confluence of writers, researchers, artists, and otherwise creative people who all wanted to peacefully overthrow the psychiatric industry and find a new way of helping people in crisis. I am glad to hear that one of your chances for Mad Culture will be from October 9-12, 2014 in Massachusetts, because the Mad In America International Film Festival will bring many film titles and speakers together.

I know that this might sound odd coming from a critical psychiatrist, but I believe that psychiatry has a future. Furthermore, I maintain that a good deal of psychiatry as practised now is helpful and that many psychiatrists manage to play a positive and therapeutic role in the lives of their patients. However, I also believe that we are at our most helpful when we depart from the current biomedical ideology that has come to dominate in our profession. As a first step, we need to get beyond the reductionism that currently guides most psychiatric research and education.

It seems I like to see people argue, or, if not to see it to read it, to be privy to it. I get off on argument; I grew up with it. I also avoid it at all costs. Yet, there is something about abuse, meanness and violent language that has always drawn me in. It could be simply because it’s familiar to me, like to many of us; it is so prevalent.

I was honored to present a lecture to the Department of Psychiatry of which Dr. Thomas Szasz was a member. The department has been hosting a celebration of his prolific career. I spoke of David Rosenhan's 1973 "experiment," in which he pretended to hear voices in order to gain admission to psychiatric hospitals. I argue that a 2000-year old stage comedy anticipates Rosenhan's experiment in virtually identical form, but it goes beyond the problems of diagnosis and approaches Szasz's view that mental illness is not a medical matter.

I became an apprentice spiritual healer among the Nacirema-Orue in 1986 and was considered culturally competent to assess and treat community members by 1992. Then, the wealthy class turned toward producing and marketing complex and dangerous elixirs and synthetic herbs which tranquilize, sedate, or hypnotize the afflicted community member rather than working with self-hatred and self-revulsion. This new Nacirema-Orue healing theory presupposes that such individuals actually have damaged brains which these elixirs correct. I’m writing this blog post because I’m afraid of being made invisible.

A recent report from the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law on "Promoting Employment of People with Mental Illness" provided the same dreary picture that those of us working in mental health systems are familiar with: that people labeled with mental disorders are employed at a much lower rate than their non-disabled peers. The report calls for broader implementation of the evidence-based practice Supported Employment, which is scarcely available to any individuals across the nation served by public mental health systems which favor funding of other behavioral health services.

There are some things to applaud about the recently released update of the NICE bipolar guidelines, not least the recognition that the diagnosis has been inappropriately applied to children with behavioural problems. Hopefully this will help curtail the worrying trend of using toxic bipolar drugs in this age group. As usual, however, the Guidelines overlook glaring problems with the evidence base for drug treatment in general, and miss an opportunity to stem the diagnostic creep that has come to the UK and Europe via the United States.

With less than three weeks to go before the start of Alternatives 2014, I feel inspired to write about why the Alternatives conference is important to the c/s/x movement for social justice and why we at the National Mental Health Consumers’ Self-Help Clearinghouse feel honored to organize this year’s conference.