First-Person Knowledge and the Meanings of Madness: An Interview with Gail Hornstein
Psychologist Gail Hornstein discusses her search for the meanings of madness, from asylum artifacts and memoirs to the contemporary peer-support groups reshaping how people understand voices and visions.
The Epidemic of Depression Diagnoses and Antidepressant Prescribing
Part of being human is to have difficulties, but they can be handled better if we donāt give people psychiatric diagnoses and drugs.
When Medical Science Refuses to Correct Itself
Science is supposed to be self-correcting. But what happens when the journals entrusted to uphold this principle become its gatekeepers?
The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations: Psychiatryās Suppression of the Highly Capable
How many highly capable people are lost to a system that champions mediocrity as a necessary implication of mental illness?
To the Few Psychiatrists Who Still Believe in ECT: See You in Court
I hope that legal cases like these will encourage psychiatrists to think twice before administering such a potentially damaging treatment.
When the Treatment Becomes Part of the Illness
Trusting the psychiatrists, I boarded a ship that would carry me on a decades-long and treacherous journey with psychiatric drugs.
My Mother Had to Be Dying Before Anyone Would Take Her Off the Drugs
On hospice, a psychiatrist finally said yes to deprescribing. Once someone is on hospice, taking medications away becomes the normal thing to do rather than the dangerous thing.
Mad Studies Is More Than Lived Experience: An Interview with Merrick Daniel Pilling
Pilling explains how Mad Studies moves from first-person knowledge to questions of sanism, psychiatric authority, mutual aid, and collective resistance.
The Existential Was Never Meant to Be Solved Alone
The sessions had value, but the relief I soughtāa true shift in how I relate to the worldāfelt impossible.
Independent Evaluation Finds No Benefit to Coercion Under New Yorkās Kendraās Law
Kendraās Law is a New York State statute that allows courts to force people with āsevere mental illnessā into involuntary Assisted Outpatient Treatment (AOT)....
Antidepressants Can Change Peaceful Citizens into Killers
We must warn about the harms of antidepressants and bring people to justice who contribute to the suicides and homicides by lies and medical malpractice.
How I Fell Into the Vultures’ Clutches
They said all my suffering was in my imagination.Ā They couldnāt have cared less about my agonyāthey laughed at me as I begged for mercy.
The West Doesnāt Have All the Answers: An Interview with Dinesh Bhugra
In this wide-ranging conversation on public mental health, psychiatrization, and community care, Dinesh Bhugra explains why meaningful lives, not symptom reduction alone, should guide mental healthcare today.
When Treatment Fails: Why I Relate to Lindsay Clancy
Despite her monstrous act, I canāt shake the feeling that Lindsay may have also suffered at the hands of a broken psychiatric system.
Benzodiazepine Use Tied to Increased Risk of Death, Especially at Higher Doses
Benzodiazepine use is common, with research estimating as many as 12.6% of US adults report past-year use. A 2019 study found significant increases in...
Unlearning Restraints: A Psychiatrist’s Journey from Patient to Practitioner
I had been the one whose fear was called dangerous, distorted into a label. Now I was on the other side, being asked to do it to someone else.
What Happened at the Guidance Center in Flagstaff, AZ
It is my assertion that the Guidance Center acts with impunity in Flagstaff, AZ, and that someone needs to step up and hold them accountable.
Absorbing Dark Emotions: Emotional Contagion
Are psychiatrists aware that susceptible people can absorb dark emotions from others when times are tough?
OCD and the Anxiety/Gut Connection
I never made the direct connection between my gut and how anxiety created physical problems! Why did not one single medical professional tell me this information?
Go/No-GoāHow Mental Health Research Took a Wrong Turn: An Interview with Author Marianne Apostolides
Marianne Apostolides discusses how Go/No-Go grew from her search for new eating-disorder treatments into a critique of the metaphors, experiments, and technologies shaping contemporary neuroscience and psychiatry. She argues that efforts to reduce distress to circuits, algorithms, and biomarkers often overlook subjectivity, agency, and the human relationships that meaningful care requires.
A Story of Bad Science: How Defenders of Antidepressant Efficacy Make Their Case
Psychiatric leaders should be in jail because they knowingly spread falsehoods about psychiatric drugs that kill.
How the Moral Panic on Psychiatric Bed Shortages is Fueling a āCompetency Crisisā in...
The number of people referred to state hospitals as āIncompetent to stand trialā (IST) has surged over the last decade. In response, states are refurbishing or rebuilding their state hospitalsā even as their own experts say this will only make the crisis worse. Why?
From Church to Clinic: The Cult of Compliance
It was jarring to realize that the rigid protocols in the church were mirrored in the clinical settings where I began my career.
Yet Another Claim About the Benefits of Antidepressants Bites The Dust
Former FDA officials write that claims that the black warning led to an increase in youth are "factually inaccurate in ways that are directly verifiable."
“Assault” and “Torture”: Patients Recall the Institutional Violence of Forced Drugging
A new article published in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology finds that patients often experience forced drugging in psychiatric contexts as dehumanizing and violent....
