A writer and a military veteran: two versions of the same man sit on a chair

Two Voices and One Chair

16
It’s a war between two voices. The writer’s voice shapes, composes, imagines. The trauma’s voice: raw, insistent, unfiltered, breaking in.
Paper head with brain and pills on red background

Antipsychotics—And How I’ve Learned to Manage the Side Effects

16
While suppressing pathological symptoms, drugs also suppress the normal instinct of "wanting to move" and "wanting to enjoy life".
Close-up of a person covered in white paint with gold cracks, kintsugi style

It’s the Cracked Ones Who Let the Light in

4
The identified patient is often the healthiest: a lighthouse desperately pointing the way to the wounds and power imbalances in the family.
A magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat labeled "Forced Treatment"

The Deceptive Politics of Civil Commitment in Oregon

12
A workgroup in Oregon unanimously recommended rights-based mental health care. Then the politicians and those invested in forced treatment splintered off and implemented the exact opposite.

The Report That Erased Me: How Misdiagnosis and Neglect Delayed My Healing

16
What looks like defiance is often a child screaming: "I don't know how to trust you, prove me wrong."
A person is in the spotlight. A wooden figure of a man. People lie around.

Treat Systems, Not Symptoms: Defending the Sanity of the Oppressed

14
Pathologizing distress benefits psychiatry, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies, but dampens responses that could dismantle oppression.

Is Dialogue the Best Medicine? A Conversation With Jaakko Seikkula

21
Jaakko Seikkula joins us on the MIA podcast to discuss how Open Dialogue came to be, the research that shows its positive outcomes, how psychiatry has failed to learn from Open Dialogue practice and more.
Crumpled papers in a trashcan

Cochrane Recommends Antidepressants for Anxiety in a Garbage In, Garbage Out Review

14
Cochrane's review of antidepressants for anxiety is misleading and harmful.
Enraged crowd of people are behind bars. Fence wire mesh barbed wire, vector silhouette. Street camera on the pillar. Sunset background.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

45
Society’s practice of physically segregating privileged people from those they deem to be “less than” has deep roots beginning with the treatment of madness.
Simple single family house with words "Peer Respite " over the front door, with a sign hanging from the doorknob saying "Closed."

America is Legislating a Return to the Asylum, One Policy at a Time

85
Federal and state policymakers across the partisan divide are defunding vital programs and rolling back policies and rights protections.

They Called It Psychiatry – I Call It Punishment

36
I was fighting something far more dangerous than madness — I was fighting a culture of fear and suppression masquerading as mental health care.
Miniature shot. People crowded in the lower right corner, walking

Where Did All the People Go?

4
The question that this history will try to answer is how Oregonian lives were affected by deinstitutionalization, in three phases.
A magnifying glass and pen on charts and data

An Approach to Making Sense of Psychiatric Research

157
I don’t consider myself a scientist in the usual sense, but I know a lot about what makes scientific findings more valid and useful.

Subpatterns: A Deeper Dive into Attachment Theory

5
Psychological issues have their roots in childhood and are linked to the attachment patterns we develop early in life.

Grossly Flawed Paper Denies that Antidepressant Withdrawal Effects are “Clinically Meaningful”

19
Pharma-funded researchers are endangering patient safety by minimising the incidence and severity of withdrawal.

The Trouble with Lived Experience: When Peer Support Compounds Trauma by Denying Abuse

15
Trauma and abuse are different experiences, and they require different forms of support, accountability, and healing.
Doctor explaining something to patient

Brain Disorders or Problems with Living? How Research on “Mental Illness” Went Awry

25
Is it time to consider the possibility that the entire field is a failed enterprise, a wrong turn in human history?
A glow through the trees of a dark forest

Becoming Stewards of Shadow: Beyond Great Men and Myths of Invention

6
Before the psyche was carved into parts with elegant diagrams and marketed methods, cultures walked with shadow. 

The Degrees on the Wall

35
The therapists who helped me most weren’t the ones who dazzled with their knowledge. They were the ones who made me feel less alone.

Mad in Puerto Rico

2
Since Puerto Rico is, in essence, a colony of the United States, colonialism has a heavy impact on mental health and the healthcare system.
Chess photo. A gold pawn faces against a line of silver pieces

Psychiatry Criticism Politics: When the Enemy of Your Enemy Is Not Your Friend

191
Those who would like to abolish psychiatry in order to replace it with their own coercive, authoritarian policies are not friends.

The Whispered Rules of Belonging: How Counseling Education Tried to Silence Me

37
I started to understand that I wasn’t just being trained in therapeutic skills. I was being trained to conform.
Creative abstract template collage of hands throw flowers aster blooming freak bizarre unusual fantasy billboard.

The Cat Is Out of the Bag

16
I’ve healed; not overnight and not without effort, but today I feel the vitality that I had before my psychiatrization began as a teen.

“I Made it Through the Horrors of Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal” A Conversation with Comedian...

32
Dex Carrington, AKA Jørgen Kjønø, is a Norwegian-American stand-up comedian and actor. He joins us on the Mad In America podcast to talk about his experience with Lyrica and Zyprexa, including a five-and-a-half-year taper after 10 years on the drugs.
Double-exposure type photo showing the same person with different expressions

A Mad Perspective on IFS Training

29
I became concerned that the reason I was unable to hear from my parts was because I take antipsychotic medication.