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Fireworks and heated debate were expected by many when Robert Whitaker recently addressed a group at the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) annual convention in San Antonio, Texas. So why was Whitaker invited to the national NAMI convention and how did it turn out?

Just as the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) long-delayed DSM5 was about to launch, the director of NIMH, Dr Thomas Insel, provoked a flurry of acrimony when he mentioned in his blog that his organisation intended to move away from the ideas behind DSM: “Patients with mental disorders deserve better... NIMH will be re-orienting its research away from DSM categories... we will be supporting research projects that look across current categories – or sub-divide current categories – to begin to develop a better system”. It now seems Insel's comments had more to do with NIMH funding needs than points of principle.

I got a call from a colleague – someone with whom I’ve worked fairly closely over these past six years. The problem was the typical reaction one can expect when you bring together people in clinical and a variety of other roles who have been indoctrinated to think that medication is the way, and you offer clear and direct challenges to their belief system. Many people (most, even) responded well to the workshop. Some did not.

In this blog, I discuss three RCTs that support Martin Harrow's findings in his naturalistic study that long term use of neuroleptics is associated with worse functional outcomes.

If your government espouses freedom for all but abuses citizens of its own as well other countries, its pronouncements are pure propaganda. This article seeks to help readers make the connection between the public and secret behaviors of the U.S. government as it continues to oppress those individuals within its reach that occupy a politically marginalized status; including, of course, persons who are survivors and/or users of psychiatric services.

On June 12th, Psychology Today published an article entitled, "Benzo Hysteria: the Chilling Effects of the 'Addictive' label," by Ed Shorter, PhD. A dangerous and unfounded claim was made in its final paragraph, which reads as follows: "The benzos are among the safest and most effective drug classes in the history of psychopharmacology." Benzodiazepines are in fact highly addictive and many people suffer for years from protracted withdrawal syndromes that are disabling.

Users & Survivors in Academia (USA) is a support, advocacy, and resource-sharing group for graduate students (both master’s and doctoral) with psychiatric disabilities or current/past experience in the behavioral health system. USA started primarily for us to reach our peers across the country and engage in mutual support and advocacy around issues we face in higher education settings. Over the past year, USA has grown to 30 members in states across the country, and has quickly evolved into a forum to organize individual and systems advocacy, and support one another in self-advocacy in our own academic institutions.

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.

Any time you create a word that only has meaning in a very specific context and then you start quite literally referring to people as if they were that word, you create more barriers to them moving beyond that context and on with their own life. Sure, it might feel good for a while. It might feel like you finally ‘belong’ somewhere. But what does that mean for your future?

It’s hard not to be enraged when your life is in shambles, you want nothing more than to get it back (and it’s happening barely, slowly, if at all), and you feel betrayed by the very people who you thought, at least at one point, meant to help you.

I am constantly around people who build their lives around negative beliefs. More specifically, I am around people that build their lives around being “broken” because of something they identify as being a “brain disease.” It breaks my heart to hear the way people view themselves.

We work with one-size-fits-all interventions and reduce patients to their indication, or diagnosis. We tell ourselves that the algorithm works when it is “evidence-based”. What does this mean when we see that the house of cards has been glued into its position?

There is a class of “naturalistic” research that can only be conducted if the researcher happens to be in the “right” place at the “right” time. Julia Rucklidge was running clinical trials using micronutrients to treat Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in adults when major earthquakes hit New Zealand. She and her research team contacted all current and past participants to establish whether they were taking micronutrients and for how long, and then they assessed how anxious, depressed and stressed people were one and two weeks post-quake. The results were revealing.

Research by Andreasen et al. published in American Journal of Psychiatry in June of 2013 reported that the dosage of antipsychotic medication correlated with the reduction in the cortex volume; higher dosage was associated with greater reduction. In that same article, the authors suggested that, since they found brain shrinkage correlated with duration of relapse, curtailing or preventing the relapse would probably decrease damage. Their suggested mechanism for shortening the relapse process was to prescribe more drugs. Before advising fellow physicians to increase the dosage of antipsychotic drugs to prevent brain volume reduction, it is important to show the following: first, demonstrate that symptoms, in fact, reflect the occurrence of a damaging process; second, demonstrate that any treatment intervention actually targets the damaging process itself and not just the downstream symptoms of this process.

The use of seclusion and restraint in mental health care in Ohio is legitimately subject to the assessment, criticisms and recommendations of the United Nations Special Rapporteur of the Human Rights Council on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

Today I read Psychiatric News, the newspaper of the American Psychiatric Association, and I was drawn to an article about the new APA President, Jeffrey Lieberman, because the front page teaser announced that "he is 'mad as hell'".

It's been fourteen and a half years since the moment that first set me on my path to becoming an activist - a moment that overwhelmed me, cowed me even, but did not, in the end, destroy me. It was the day I was physically broken because I had tried to assert what I felt was an absolute right to some meaningful hearing on my detention. It was the day I learned about torture.

To respond to controversy and resistance developing in response to the recommendation of Special Rapporteur on Torture Juan E. Méndez for an absolute ban on nonconsensual psychiatric interventions, I suggested to use June 26, the International Day in Solidarity with Victims of Torture, to raise awareness and support for the recommendations. What started out way more ambitious became a relatively informal call put out over email lists, Facebook and with the help of the Mad In America website, to MIA bloggers.

“What I’d really like to do is stop everything,” I say. The reality is that psychiatrists are not the experts when it comes to getting people off psychiatric drugs.

In Grimm’s fairy tale Rumpelstiltskin, an impish little man helps a girl spin straw into gold. This story seems an apt metaphor for how legitimate neuroscience research can become transformed into sensationalist claims regarding the causes and treatment of ADHD.

Earlier today, Matthew Cohen announced the launch of Mad in America’s directory of providers who support psychiatric drug withdrawal.  Many thanks to him for...

One of the first things I heard from Bob Whitaker when I joined Mad In America was this, "I get emails every single day from people asking if I know where they can get help coming off their medication, and I don't know what to tell them. We need to do something about this."Since then, I've received many messages with the same question myself, and rarely have I been able to offer concrete advice. Thankfully, that has changed! Today, we are pleased to announce the Mad In America directory of service providers featuring practitioners and programs who support withdrawal from psychiatric drugs, as well as other alternatives to the mainstream paradigm of care.

I am just back from a conference - or what was called a study meeting - at the Vatican, entitled, “The Child as a Person and as a Patient: Therapeutic Approaches Compared.” Held under the auspices of the Pontifical Council for Health Care Workers, the two-day meeting on Friday June 14 and Saturday June 15 in the Vatican’s Pope Pius X Hall drew some 250 participants from 30 countries. This has been 6 years in the making, mainly representing the hard work and perseverance of Marcia Barbacki. I have also participated for the duration because I thought it was, perhaps, the best opportunity ever to spread the word about the risks of psychotropics for youth given that Catholic Health Care represents 26% of the world’s healthcare and the Church’s ability to disseminate information to all corners of the globe.

Evidence that antipsychotics cause brain shrinkage has been accumulating over the last few years, but the psychiatric research establishment is finding its own results difficult to swallow. A new paper by a group of American researchers once again tries to ‘blame the disease,’ a time-honoured tactic for diverting attention from the nasty and dangerous effects of some psychiatric treatments. People need to know about this research because it indicates that antipsychotics are not the innocuous substances that they have frequently been portrayed as. We still have no conclusive evidence that the disorders labeled as schizophrenia or psychosis are associated with any underlying abnormalities of the brain, but we do have strong evidence that the drugs we use to treat these conditions cause brain changes.

The Vatican conference on “The Child as a Person and as a Patient: Therapeutic Approaches Compared,” which took place on June 14 and 15 in Rome, was not really focused—as I had thought it would be—on the merits of medicating children for psychiatric disorders. The two Americans who had tirelessly campaigned for this conference, Marcia Barbacki and Barry Duncan, had hoped that it would serve that purpose, but the Pontifical Council for Health Care Workers, as it invited speakers, decided on a broader, more diffuse agenda.