12 Mental Health Design Principles to Replace This Thing
One of the issues we face in mental health is that everyone knows the system is broken, but there is no replacement yet. So the question is, what are the mental health design principles to build a replacement? How do you build a functional mental health system that isn't disease-based? How do you make it robust, scalable and spreadable?
Former Service User Studies the Inpatient Experience
Researcher and former service-user Diana Rose utilizes a participatory research process to examine experiences on inpatient wards.
Mad in Asia: Towards Multiple Narratives for Inclusion
An e-zine with the mission to contribute to changing the narrative about madness and mental distress in the Asia region has launched. Mad in Asia hopes to showcase narratives that are contextually relevant to the Asia region, with a focus on the human rights of persons with psychosocial disabilities.
Psychologists Argue for Decolonial Approach to Global Poverty
Individualist psychological models of poverty pathologize poor communities, decolonial approaches that emphasize context and interdependence may be more sustainable.
Inhumane Medicine in Germany: A Dark Chapter Continued
Although I left Ueckermünde without the ability to speak, heavily traumatized and barely able to move, I managed to reclaim life after more than a decade. Today I am one of the few witnesses who survived the Hell of Ueckermünde, who can tell the story of my companions and raise awareness of the injustice committed against us as well as demand answers.
Study Shows Poor Outcomes for the Treatment for Childhood Anxiety
New research identifies poor long-term outcomes for both CBT and medications for treating anxiety disorders in childhood.
Benzodiazepine Awareness 2018
A special two-part interview to join in with events for World Benzodiazepine Awareness Day 2018. We hear from W-BAD Lead Operations Volunteer Nicole Lamberson, psychiatrist Dr Josef Witt-Doerring, therapist and campaigner Chris Paige and Mad in America founder Robert Whitaker.
Poor and Foster Care Children More Likely to be Diagnosed and Treated with Psychiatric...
Study details Medicaid-insured birth cohort’s exposure to psychiatric medications and mental health services.
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation No Better Than Placebo for Treatment-Resistant Depression
A new study in JAMA Psychiatry found that transcranial magnetic stimulation was no better than placebo for treatment-resistant depression.
Anti-Stigma Campaigns Enable Inequality, Sociologists Argue
Scholars contend that stigma functions as a mechanism of power in analysis of UK Heads Together mental health campaign.
In Defense of Healthy Depression
With the increasing medicalization of depression, and as more and more physicians see the treatment of depression as falling under their purview, it is imperative to distinguish between actual clinical depression and "healthy depression" — the adaptive and expectable responses to distressing life events that signal a need for rethinking one's life and recalibrating one's self-perceptions and emotions.
Peter Groot and Akansha Vaswani: Tapering Strips and Shared Decision-Making
Doctoral candidate Akansha Vaswani interviews researcher and geneticist Dr. Peter Groot, who has led the development of Tapering Strips, a novel and practical method by which people taking certain prescription medications can gradually reduce their dosage.
Police Killings Vicariously Impact Mental Health of Black Americans
New research provides evidence that police killings of unarmed Black Americans impact the mental health of Black Americans.
“The Lion King” Psychiatrized: What If Psychiatry Had Gotten Its Hands on Simba?
It is time for a new strategy. Rather than try to get adults to question their entrenched beliefs, why not reach out directly to not-yet-fully-indoctrinated kids? This could be done by creating psychiatrized versions of their favorite films that show how ridiculous and harmful the medical model is. Scene 1: Annoyed by Simba's exuberance, Mufasa takes him to Rafiki, the monkey psychiatrist.
FDA Defends Decision to Approve Digital Aripiprazole
Members of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Psychiatry Products division go on the defensive in a new article, responding to concerns about the agency’s approval of digital aripiprazole.
The Creation of an Illness: Video Games and Defining Addiction
Part of what we mean when we say something is socially constructed is that the existence of an entity, in this case a specific medical condition, partly or wholly depends on certain social attitudes, beliefs, or reactions towards that entity. In this particular case, a mental illness exists if and only if it causes certain types of distress that we get to define.
Addressing Depression and Heart Disease with Exercise and Physical Activity
A new study examines the effects of midlife exercise on depression and cardiovascular health later in life.
Early Attention to Life Circumstances and Relationships Improves Outcomes for Psychosis
Coordinated care with employment support and family therapy leads to superior outcomes for those diagnosed with psychotic disorders.
“The Angry Consumer”: Embracing Difficult Conversations
Judgments of the so-called ‘angry consumer’ deeply reinforce divisions within mental health policy and services. The only way we can engage in meaningful co-production is not to gloss over histories of collective exclusion and disempowerment and all the pain and anger that goes with it, but rather to validate and work through difficult emotions.
The Drugging of Migrant Children: A Symptom of a Systemic Issue
Isolation, demeaning behaviors on the part of staff, forced injections and tranquilization — former patients of detention and residential facilities have been describing this inhumanity as the norm for decades. It is our acceptance of this as a norm that allows for abusive situations to arise so easily.
Selling Nicotine on a Psych Ward
A psych hospital is like any other institution of total control. You have locked doors around you, there are guard-like mental health workers, and you only have so many ways to get by. Some people choose to sleep all the time. Some people choose to pace. And some people choose, given the right time and the right opportunity, to learn to steal or to get by in other ways.
Drug Treatment in Medicine and Psychiatry: Papering Over Important Differences
The treatment of mental disorders with drugs is not the same sort of activity as the use of drugs in medicine. The ethical implications of the two situations are different. Insisting on equating the two obscures these differences and presents the use of drugs for mental distress as less controversial than it actually is.
Can Mindfulness Help With Burnout?
A new study investigates the effects of mindfulness-based interventions on employee’s wellbeing across different workplace environments.
Research Finds Parents’ Trauma May Impact Children’s Health
Study uncovers some of the intergenerational consequences of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs).
How to Help Someone Who is Suicidal
Together, we can hold individuals who are plumbing the depths of their pain and help them to transform it. We can show them that there is another, med-free way to accept themselves and that there is precedent for what it looks like to break free from psychiatry, its labels, and consciousness-warping chemicals.
