Trump Anxiety Disorder Is More Fake News
For many people, the current political situation around the world is intensely frightening and not without cause. Depression and anxiety are on the rise, but we need a social model revolution in order to look at why this is happening. Labels like Trump Anxiety Disorder are merely a way to put people’s concerns in a box and leave them unaddressed.
Part 1: Neurodiversity–What Exactly Does It Mean?
The fuzzy concept of neurodivergence has expanded to include almost every human experience, plus its opposite.
Despite Claims, EPA Supplement Does Not Improve ADHD Symptoms in Youth
A new study reports that the supplement EPA improved ADHD symptoms but a closer look calls these results into question.
Health Risks to Babies When Antidepressants Used During Pregnancy
Babies born to mothers taking antidepressants during pregnancy were more than six times as likely to have neonatal withdrawal syndrome—including breathing problems, irritability/agitation, tremors, feeding problems, and seizures—than those born to mothers taking other types of drugs.
Hearing Voices: Where We Locate Them Shapes Our Experience
My experience began when I heard two people talking about me when I was home alone. I needed a reasonable explanation, and concluded that it had to be my upstairs neighbors. Then I began to hear the voices outside of my apartment — this new presentation meant that my explanation no longer made sense.
Exploring the Fault Lines in Mental Health Discourse: An Interview with Psychologist Justin Karter
Justin Karter discusses his journey to Mad in America, competing models of mental health, and how we navigate these stories in psychotherapy.
Fighting Unjustified Commitment in Wisconsin: Leslie’s Story
Leslie was not experiencing any depression, psychosis, or suicidal or homicidal ideation. She was not a danger to herself or others. Yet she had been picked up by police, placed in handcuffs, and brought to the hospital, and her social worker intended to have her placed in a group home.
Making the Transition to Compassionate Care
I feel my brother was harmed not only by psychiatric drugs, poor nutrition, and dehydration but also by the lack of compassion, social isolation, and dehumanization experience typical of psychiatric facilities.
Reexamining Schizophrenia as a Brain Disease
Schizophrenia has occupied, and continues to occupy, a position of great import in psychiatry, and it is frequently used to assert the supposed biological nature of the field. What evidence is there to suggest that what we call schizophrenia is a disease of the brain? Surprisingly, very little.
Study Finds Music Therapy May Be Effective in Clinical Practice
In a new study published in The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, Professor Sam Porter and co-authors, present the results of a music...
From the Dopamine Theory to the Outcomes Paradox
Why does long-term use of neuroleptics correlate with poorer social and occupational outcomes?
Researchers Push Back Against Recommendation to Combine Antidepressants for Suicide Prevention
Researchers challenge the recommendation of starting two antidepressants simultaneously to increase preventative effects against suicide.
Neurosexism: Study Questions Validity of Gender-based Neuroscientific Results
Neuroscientific results that class humans into two categories, “male” and “female,” tend to reify gender stereotypes by giving them the appearance of objective scientific truth.
Malcharist: Fact or Fiction? Big Pharma, Psychiatry’s Key Opinion Leaders and their Ghostwriters
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.
Reclaiming My Yin and Yang
Western psychiatry has done a lot of harm to people, especially when it is forced upon people as their “only” option. People’s experiences are wildly diverse, and only a diversity of options can do justice to our differing needs.
The Language of Internalized Oppression
I realize many folks get irritated by the ‘moving target’ of language, but understand that this is a process of unlearning for us all. It’s not so much that the words randomly keep changing as it is that the oppression embedded in our words and ways of being runs deeper than most of us could have ever imagined. Unraveling it all is a long way off.
Bonnie Burstow and Nick Walker: An Introduction to Cognitive Liberty
This week on the Mad in America Podcast we launch our series on forced treatment, interviewing antipsychiatry scholar Bonnie Burstow and neurodiversity scholar Nick Walker. Central to both Nick and Bonnie’s work is the concept of cognitive liberty, or freedom and integrity of the mind.
Antidepressant Use Leads to Worse Long Term Outcomes, Study Finds
Results from a 30-year prospective study demonstrated worse outcomes for people who took antidepressants, even after controlling for gender, education level, marriage, baseline severity, other affective disorders, suicidality, and family history of depression.
Threatened for Telling the Truth: Polish Journalist Speaks Out
Now I’m under attack, with threats of violence flung at me alongside threats of lawsuits. And all because I shared the large body of peer-reviewed research that contradicts the mainstream assumptions of psychiatry.
On the Brink of Murder Because of an Antidepressant
After being put on antidepressants, Katinka started hallucinating wildly, thinking in very violent images.
Akathisia and Prescribed Harm as Traumatic Chemical Brain Injury (TCBI)
I stopped thinking of akathisia in terms of the disease model and instead began thinking of it as an injury. Akathisia is not the car crash; it is a result of the car crash.
What Is “Care” in a Psychiatric Medical Camp for the Unhoused in India?
Indian doctoral scholar Neha Jain wonders what kind of ‘care’ and ‘help’ are possible in the absence of real consent.
Alcoholism — Is it a Disease?
We are told a story about illness, and that story serves a mindset that underlies the darkness that we feel all around us and within us. The mindset is that we are flesh robots, floating on a dead rock, in the middle of nowhere. But we are in the midst of a paradigm shift.
Therapy Beats Drugs for Depression for Long-Term Outcomes
Combining drugs and therapy also did not lead to better depression outcomes than therapy alone.
Increasing Prevalence of Mood Disorders Among Teens and Young Adults
Depression, serious psychological distress, and suicide attempts have risen substantially since the early 2000s among young adults – what’s changed?
