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New research counters the long-held assumption that a longer duration of untreated psychosis is associated with worse outcomes.

MIA’s Ayurdhi Dhar interviews Ian Parker about critical psychology, discourse and political action, and whether psychology has anything left to offer.

Some might wonder why I'm still stumbling in the desert when there are cars and jobs and museums downtown, but really, the turquoise dawn is in the canyons. The thing is, my people seem to need this nutrition, the rarified medicine of this particular cactus and that specific root that I haven't found anywhere else.

Women’s issues and mental health were embedded in radical mental medicine fifty years ago. Feminism and sexual politics in the late 1960s and 1970s led to a reassessment of gender-based hierarchies in the mental health establishment, and transformative change was the result.

The following are some ways in which trauma commonly impacts a trauma survivor’s life. Imagine, as you read, how different our society might be if systems of care and justice were as trauma-informed as your life might be.

An interview with Beatrice Birch who is the initiator of the residential healing community Inner Fire. For over 35 years, Beatrice worked as a Hauschka artistic therapist in integrative clinics and inspiring initiatives in England, Holland and the USA. We discuss how Inner Fire works to help the people that attend, and how a core principle of their healing work is that ‘human being are creators, not victims’.

Researchers treat voicehearing as the sign of a disease or a disorder or a dysfunction of the brain. That it might be something more—a relationship of some kind with God that developed in this way as part of our evolution over eons—does not seem to have occurred to anyone who has worked in the field of psychology.

Such interventions, the report says, "generally involve highly discriminatory and coercive attempts at controlling or 'correcting' the victim’s personality, behaviour or choices and almost always inflict severe pain or suffering."

The metaphor of “mental disease” is doing more harm than good. Rather than being a tool for communication, it has crossed the boundary from a metaphor to a theory that underpins much of what happens within public mental health services. This places psychiatrists in a position of dutiful compliance with what is essentially a fallacious model.

Recent research implicates benzodiazepines as being involved in a high rate of emergency department visits in the US.

Tea is my weapon of choice for battling anxiety and depression. But its true power comes from the people behind the cup. Tea is merely the drink that brings us together.

Researchers confirm that the suicide warning for antidepressants is justified by the evidence and that claims that the warning is harmful lack support.

I am a psychiatrist and I have been watching my profession deteriorate for many decades. This is my most direct written statement about the dangers of stepping inside a modern psychiatrist’s office. My conclusions are the culmination of mountains of research authored by me and by an increasing number of other psychiatrists, scientists and journalists.

My historical study of the Essex asylum, just outside London, finds that those who were admitted showed significant disturbances of behaviour or evidence of organic disease. Almost two-thirds of those who had psychological, as opposed to organic, disorders were discharged recovered or improved (mostly recovered).

Doctors refuse to believe psychiatric medications have caused my sibling, Pat, any harm.  Over a three-year period, however, Pat's insurance companies have paid out more than one million dollars to warehouse Pat and to provide "treatment" that has caused complete disability.

A skilled approach to working with beliefs involves both toleration of differences in perspective and an awareness of a variety of possible things that can be tried when a belief is causing problems that do not seem to be tolerable, either to the person or to others with whom they must interact.

MIA’s Peter Simons interviews Laysha Ostrow about her mental health research and consulting company, the inclusion of peer specialists in mental health care, and her personal experience with the mental health system.

One of the things that’s still most challenging for me in doing therapy is resisting the impulse to come up with solutions to my clients’ problems. I find the role of “answer woman” very seductive. It’s not only because the people who come to me for help usually assume, at least at first, that help means solutions.

In 2001, I discovered the astonishing power and beauty of Gestalt Chairwork. Building on Perls’ and Moreno’s seminal work, I have developed a therapeutic model based on four orienting principles and four core dialogical stances.

Inside the hospital, I was a social butterfly and knew practically everyone on my wing, but at home, I was a nobody and a loner. If only I had the energy to fake it one hundred percent of the time, then nobody would suspect a thing.

Incorporating philosophical debate into psychiatric care forces us to confront the assumptions of therapy. Many "progressive" psychiatric institutions may have been built on solid foundations revolutionary for their time, yet they run the risk of coming to a standstill without continuous and vehement debate.

Our movement, by not effectively addressing misconduct and corruption, is creating the same toxic dynamics we see so often in families, in schools, in a society that silences people and drives them into distress and madness.

A new survey exploring antipsychotic user experience finds that more than half of the participants report only negative experiences.

In response to critics of psychiatry, doctors sometimes argue that medication is just a part of care, not everything. But if a grand rounds presentation intended to educate the profession doesn’t mention anything at all except medication, what are we teaching young therapists and doctors?

Supporters of the nature (genetic) side of the “nature versus nurture” debate often cite studies of “reared-apart” or “separated” MZ twin pairs (identical, monozygotic) in support of their positions. In this article I present evidence that, in fact, most studied pairs of this type do not qualify as reared-apart or separated twins.