A Moment to Reflect
Within my heart, something feels like it’s been stolen. But they tell me it’s all in my brain, a tripped-up neurocircuitry, a misguided chemical.
The Answers Are in Our Weak Spots
When looking at your own weak spots as a therapist, it would be a safe bet to first consider how you can improve your skills in developing a stronger alliance.
Long Term Antidepressant Use Associated With Increased Morbidity and Mortality
A study finds that commonly prescribed antidepressants are associated with the development of diabetes, hypertension, and other diseases.
Grief, Intense Feelings, and Pathologization: Can We Conceive a Different Approach?
We still try to shove every kind of emotion into a neatly organized box, give it a label, maybe even an accompanying medicine to make it neat and predictable.
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.
“Don’t Worry, You’ll Be Fine”
I was prescribed a “baby dose” of diazepam for pain management. Over the following months, everything got progressively worse.
Mental Health & Our Schools, Part 2
Schools are rolling out programs and services intended to safeguard students’ emotional well-being. They are full of potential—and pitfalls.
20 Concrete Steps to Achieving System Change
I offer the following 20 suggestions for advocates who want to get something done and not just vent their quite justifiable criticisms of the mental health system.
An Illness, or Risky Experimentation?
Questioning is what I did, but once I started questioning so much of what I had learned and of what my identity had been, it wasn’t obvious to me where I should stop.
In Andrew’s Honor: Attorney Elizabeth Rich’s Fight Against Unjust Commitments
Anyone detained and then formally committed under Wisconsin’s civil mental health laws can initially be held and forcibly drugged for six long months. Yet, for years, not a single person has been able to appeal the six-month commitments in court.
Systematic Failure
This is the story of a life in turmoil, my failings and those of the systems meant to help such persons.
A Return to Dignity from Psychiatric and Childhood Abuse
Homebirth was a reflection of how the mental health system should work: Informed person-centered care while respecting your agency.
Why We Urgently Need New Approaches to Mental Health
Emotions function like a guidepost to what we need. But if we are not aware this, we cannot understand what they are trying to convey.
Meaningless Distractibility, or Meaningful Mind-Wandering?
What do we lose when we view boredom and curiosity as "symptoms" of ADHD? It can rob us of intuitions that crucial life changes desperately need to be made.
Thomas Szasz Versus the Mental Health Movement
Unbiased experts must examine the claims and research of psychiatry and issue a report as to whether psychiatry not only has a valid medical basis, but whether this basis justifies the widespread violation of medical ethics and the routine use of imprisonment and torture.
Understanding the Limits of the Beneficial Effect of Antidepressants Reported in the Meta-analysis by...
Stone, M. B., Yaseen, Z. S., Miller, B. J., Richardville, K., Kalaria, S. N., & Kirsch, I. (2022). Response to acute monotherapy for major...
The Psychiatrist’s Dilemma: In Defense of Placebo Psychiatry
Telling stories they know are or may be untrue has become standard practice in psychiatry. It is a small step to set aside the need to provide truly informed consent.
Is Service-User Research Possible in Mental Health? An Interview with Diana Rose
MIA’s Ayurdhi Dhar interviews Diana Rose about producing knowledge with survivors of psychiatry, abuses faced by service users, and what good research would look like.
“Beware, Scientology Related”: How ADHD Experts Silence Criticism
We do not belong to the scientology movement, but this false accusation triggered an email correspondence that exposed the problematic happenings usually behind closed academic curtains.
#RestoreTheirRights: An Update on Guardianship Action
It’s time to change the conversation around guardianship. The question is not “When do we remove someone’s rights?” but “How can we best support them?”
Madness to Miracles
I lost 20 years of my life and everyone and everything I held dear, including myself, due to psychiatric medicine. Why did doctors not see how drastically I changed and how rapid and brutal my descent was?
The Culture Is the Poison: Why Psychedelics Are Dangerous Medicine in a Neoliberal Society
Extraction of psychedelics from the ritual process has dissociated them from community, connectedness, and responsibility, which used to define psychedelic drug use.
Jon Jureidini–Evidence-Based Medicine in a Post-Truth World
In this interview, Jon Jureidini talks about the issues with evidence-based medicine and describes what led to the debasement of a system originally conceived to challenge extravagant claims and poor science.
A Developmental Response to Trauma and Trauma Language
Understanding life events (and/or our responses to them) as trauma has transformed how we suffer and how we relate to pain.
Top 10 Myths About the Critics of Psychiatry
Service-users' experience was at the heart of everything the critics spoke about, as well as the importance of relying on the most up-to-date and accurate evidence.
