World Mental Health Day 2017: Challenging the Messages – A Call to Action

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If we can have a presence and visibility, this could be life-changing for individuals with no current access to the bigger truths about psychiatric theory and practice. So let's infiltrate and disrupt the hashtags #WMHD2017 #worldmentalhealthday and share messages of hope, healing, validation and solidarity!
MDMA

The Upcoming MDMA Research Will Transform Mental Health Care

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If MDMA can effectively treat and perhaps even cure PTSD it will create clear documentation that the core premises of the chemical imbalance theory are dead wrong. It is ironic and only fitting that a chemical molecule will finally bury the chemical imbalance theory and allow us to move on.

The Need to Address Suicide in Prisons

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Rates of suicide in prison are significantly higher than in the general population.
scientism

The Scientism of Psychiatry

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Psychiatry likes to portray itself as a scientific discipline, and indeed there is a lot of useful science to draw on when evaluating the evidence base connected to mental health problems. Sadly, most of the mainstream psychiatric literature of recent decades has shown a marked preference for rhetoric over scientific accuracy.

Using Participatory Action in Bioethics Research

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Participatory action approaches in bioethics research used to decrease coercion and seclusion in psychiatric treatment.

A Nurse’s Nightmare: Child Nearly Dies from ADHD Drug

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My hope and prayer is that this dramatic look at a negative effect of this class of drugs will help you understand that, in my professional assessment, their risks outweigh their benefits.

The Ups and Downs of Online Therapy

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Now that the novelty has worn off and we are able to step back and analyze the situation, what does the switch to teletherapy portend for our profession?
crossroads

2017: A Wake-up Call on Mental Health and Human Rights

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At Mental Health Europe, we see 2017 as having been a crossroads for mental health and human rights. Let’s ensure that this yields concrete change in 2018 with the support of like-minded communities ready to take the discussion to the next level and truly enact this as a civil rights movement.

Lee Coleman – The Insanity Defence, Storytelling on the Witness Stand

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An interview with Doctor Lee Coleman, in which we focus on psychiatry in the courtroom and why the psychiatric expert witness role may be failing both the individual on trial and society at large.
A boy is holding a head. He is unhappy and upset.

The Faulty Reasoning That Turned ADHD Into a Disease

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Leading ADHD researchers outline four mistakes that turned ADHD from a description of behavior into a medical disease.

Ken Burns’ “Hiding in Plain Sight…”: Candid Interviews, Canned Conclusions

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I was hoping for more accurate representation of youth mental health challenges. What I saw instead was a glossy patchwork of mixed messages.

Sudden Antipsychotic Withdrawal—Not Low Dose—Leads to Relapse

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A new article in Lancet Psychiatry debunks past studies claiming that those on low doses of antipsychotics are more likely to relapse.

Grant, Interrupted: An Introduction and Report Back from Oregon

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We hope the Oregon Health Authority can overcome its critics and get back on track to doing what it set out to do: creating peer support respites led by grassroots groups.
Malcharist cover art

Malcharist: Fact or Fiction? Big Pharma, Psychiatry’s Key Opinion Leaders and their Ghostwriters

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Malcharist, by Paul John Scott, is a fictional account of one of psychiatry’s most influential key opinion leaders (KOLs), his ghostwriter, and a journalist on the trail of a big scandal in the world of Big Pharma.
delusions delusional

I Believe There’s a Gene for Psychosis… And We All Have It!

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Without a capacity for delusional thinking, official religions likely couldn’t have thrived, and civilizations couldn’t have developed and flourished. So I conclude that the formula of two parts rationality plus one part delusionality was essential in helping man to ultimately outcompete all other species.
3d illustration of pawns over black background with red, orange and green circles

Toxic Interactions: Social Circumstances and Well-Being

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Social circumstances are indisputably connected to psychological well-being, but this has gained no traction in policy and service provision.

Psychiatry in Need of “Fundamental Rethinking”

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Prominent researchers in psychiatry urge the field to move away from a rigid biological focus toward social and psychological perspectives to meet the needs of today’s world.

Not Just a Dream: Finding the Mental Health Community I’d Been Longing For

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I dreamed of a place where healers weren’t afraid of intense states like madness. They embraced it; maybe they’d been through it themselves.
55 steps to informed consent

55 Steps to Informed Consent

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55 Steps is a new film based on a true story that centers around two women: Collette, a lawyer with a tendency to work long hours, and Eleanor, who has spent far too much time incarcerated in hospitals. Over the course of five years, Collette fights for Eleanor’s right to choose whether or not she takes psychiatric drugs. This film is imperfect, but its importance can’t be ignored.

Post-Acute Withdrawal Syndrome (PAWS): How the Last Step to Recovery Became the Final Step...

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How persistent, unbearable suffering, due to prolonged withdrawal from antipsychotics prescribed as a sleeping medication, led to euthanasia.

Tweeting While Psychiatry Burns

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Part one of a lecture given at a British Neuropsychiatric Association meeting on February 22 under the heading of Psychopharmacology: 1952–2017. In slide 2, you see Tokyo University on fire. The students have occupied the Department of Psychiatry and stay for ten years.

Made “Mad” in America

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It will take me over three years to remove all this medication from my body, and countless months to recover from the harmful effects these drugs had on my mind.
Doctor looking perplexed or angry pointing at a clipboard

How the Medical Profession Pathologizes Emotions and the Damage to Patients

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Doctors’ diagnostic inflexibility and unwillingness to take an integrative approach limits patients’ autonomy in their own treatment.

SSRI Exposure in Pregnancy Alters Fetal Neurodevelopment

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Alterations in gray matter and white matter development found in infants of mothers taking SSRI antidepressants during pregnancy.
antipsychotic

Duration of Untreated Psychosis Revisited: Response to the Goff Paper

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Based on the studies cited, it seems hard to support the assertion that “early initiation of antipsychotics may improve long-term course of the illness.” This raises an urgent question about initial treatment. Doesn’t it make sense to try to capture all of those individuals who might get through a psychosis without drugs?