From Peer Support to Psychedelics: Psychiatry’s Co-Optation & De-Radicalization
To strip psychedelic use down to its chemicals is to de-radicalize its communal and anti-authoritarian roots. Given psychiatry’s history of treatment outcome failure and its ethically compromising financial relationships with Big Pharma, is it really a good idea to make psychiatry the societal authority in charge of psychedelic use?
One Pill To Disrupt: Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal and the Marital Relationship
The suicidality that accompanies akathisia is the natural human impulse to escape being tortured. To save my wife, the woman I love, I was forced to argue for her continued torture.
Global Survey Leads to New Recommendations for Deprescribing Psychiatric Drugs
Growing rates of long-term psychiatric drug prescriptions and documented issues with withdrawal demonstrate a need for safe deprescribing practices.
Mad Poetry Slam!
Poets with lived experience with mental distress are invited to perform their poetry live at MIA's Mad Poetry Slam on Zoom on May 7th, 12PM EST.
Uncovering Radical Psychiatry and Institutional Psychotherapy in Postwar France: An Interview with Camille Robcis
MIA's Micah Ingle interviews historian Camile Robcis about radical and liberatory forms of psychiatry and psychotherapy in postwar France.
Acute Religious Experiences: Madness, Psychosis, and Religious Studies
It is the capacity of mad studies to advance the idea that mad is not necessarily bad. Acute Religious Experiences are always phenomenally mad, but not necessarily pathological.
Critical Psychiatry Textbook, Chapter 7: Psychosis (Part One)
Psychosis pills were hailed as a great advance, but this was because they kept the patients docile and quiet, which was very popular with the staff in psychiatric wards.
Mad/Cripistemologies of Pandemic Parenting: Insights for Our “Post-COVID-19” Present
Respondents described the grief and rage associated with being socially isolated while healing from childbirth and caring for a newborn, in some cases, entirely on their own.
Disability as a Creative Practice
I wanted to explore how time and sequence work when memory is disrupted, in my case due to traumatic brain injury. I needed to document and reclaim my own sensorium.
Compassion and Understanding Versus Drugs and Disease: Where Does Humanistic Psychology Stand Now?
Authors with lived experience of extreme states present a humanistic contrast to psychiatry.
Martin Harrow: The Galileo of Modern Psychiatry (1933 – 2023)
Harrow's research over the years told of how long-term antipsychotic use is associated with worse outcomes, even after controlling for psychosis severity.
25 Years Later: Honoring a Stress Breakdown
This was no illness. And I knew my biochemistry was not the primary issue. I chose to call it a severe stress breakdown.
Critical Psychiatry Textbook, Chapter 6: Psychiatric Drug Trials Are Not Reliable
In this blog, Gøtzsche discusses the ways in which drug trials are biased, including breaking of the double-blind and industry manipulation.
Screening for Perinatal Depression: An Effective Intervention, or One That Does More Harm Than Good?
Why does the U.S. describe perinatal screening as providing a proven benefit, while the task forces in the U.K. and Canada see no evidence of such benefit?
What’s Missing from NAMI and Pro-Psychiatry: Lived Experience
Since many psych patients become forced consumers, their advocates have a duty to be educated and concerned with adverse reactions.
How Peer Reviewers and Editors Protected a Failed Paradigm for Psychiatric Drug Testing
My recent article was so threatening to the whole edifice of psychiatry that the peer reviewers and editors did what they could to kill it.
“Making a Silk Purse Out of a Sow’s Ear”: Erick Turner on How Publication...
Ayurdhi Dhar interviews Erick Turner about publication bias in antidepressant trials, compromised psychotherapeutic research, and a culture of journal worship.
Beyond Labels and Meds—Closer Look: Isabella Castillo
At times I tend to feel invisible. Sometimes I don’t feel like I fit in with everyone else; I feel like an outsider.
Critical Psychiatry Textbook, Chapter 5: Psychiatric Diagnoses Are Not Reliable (Part Two)
The screening test for depression recommended by the WHO is so poor that for every 100 screened, 36 will get a false diagnosis of depression.
New Guidance on Antidepressant Withdrawal for Doctors in the UK
New guidance for primary care doctors in the UK on antidepressant discontinuation acknowledges severe and long-lasting withdrawal symptoms.
New York Can’t—or Won’t—Provide Data on New Forced Treatment Plan
When we requested specific numbers and data, the presenter suggested that there were so many different players, agencies, and moving parts it was hard to “make sense” of all the information.Â
Beyond Psychiatry: A Trauma-Centric View of Mental Health
Internal family systems therapy is a non-pathologizing method of working toward healing from trauma, a journey of returning to wholeness by reconnecting with ourselves.
Beyond Labels and Meds—Closer Look: Madeline Aliah
Meet another talented teen behind the pieces in MIA's art exhibition. She writes: "This poem was written in my first year at a queer-positive school and is processing the new forms of guilt and shame I experienced and was exposed to."
Critical Psychiatry Textbook, Chapter 5: Psychiatric Diagnoses Are Not Reliable (Part One)
Psychiatric diagnoses have poor validity and do not tell us much about the nature, course, and treatment of the "diseases."
Understanding the Neurobiology of Post-SSRI Sexual Dysfunction
Post-SSRI sexual dysfunction (PSSD) may be a common adverse effect of antidepressants. Researchers are now attempting to understand the neurobiology behind it.