The Great Slowdown: Why Breaking Down Is Waking Up
Who is really more ill? A person who responds in a natural way to trauma? Or the indifferent society that locates so-called ‘disorders’ within the people that it harms, rather than itself?
The Role of Love in Mental Health
The one core ingredient on which any recovery from emotional distress depends is the one that never makes an appearance in any medical handbook or psychiatric diagnostic manual—that is, love.
Welcome to Planet Psychiatry
With the leadership of industry and their cosseted, lapdog doctors, psychiatric medications are prescribed indiscriminately to nearly anyone entering a physician’s office with a psychological complaint.
Creativity and COVID: Art-Making During the Pandemic
The pandemic lockdown last year afforded me a precious gift of time to explore my creative spirit, and that, in turn, gave me a powerful way to cope.
Insane Medicine, Chapter 10: The Paradigm Shift Is Inevitable
We must advocate for policies that create environments that are more nurturing for us all in a society that helps provide people with meaning, a sense of community, and a sense of civic duty.
Researchers Document Protracted Withdrawal from Antidepressants
Protracted Withdrawal Syndrome characterized by long-term adverse experiences after coming off of antidepressants.
The Lessons of Music: Nurturing Mental Health in Cultures Around the Globe
Music is an ancient and omnipresent tool for wellness, a carrier of peace for individuals, and a bonding agent for communities throughout history and the world.
Missionary Headshrinkers in Gold Canyons: A Survivor’s Perspective
Missionaries and psychiatrists have failed not through lack of compassion but through lack of willingness to take a long walk and a long, long talk to ask the neighbors what they need and the people what they already know.
Kendra’s Law Must Be a Beginning, Not an End
I believe that, as things are right now, forced treatment can be justifiable. But we need to move studies and research forward, move mental health treatment forward into an era where forced treatment is obsolete.
Trauma and Mental Health in Social Movements: An Interview with Janice Haaken
MIA's Emaline Friedman interviews psychologist and filmmaker Janice Haaken about how mental health discourse impacts social movements.
Left-Wing Behavioral Genetics? A Closer Look at the Genetic Evidence in “The Cult of...
Behavioral genetic “discoveries” are a mirage, a house of cards that ignores contradictory evidence from countless real-world examples and research findings from other fields, that collapses under serious critical analysis.
Insane Medicine, Chapter 9: The Worried Parent (Part 2)
Once you have managed to shift the relational dance for a while, you will start to get on with your new life; hopefully you have got far enough forward to establish a new “script”; a new family relational dance.
The False Memory Syndrome at 30: How Flawed Science Turned into Conventional Wisdom ...
Soon after states finally began providing adults who remembered childhood abuse with the legal standing to sue, the FMSF began waging a PR campaign to discredit their memories—in both courtrooms and in the public mind.
The Nurtured Heart Approach Instead of Drugs: An Interview with Howard Glasser
This episode of “Mad in the Family” focuses on a non-drug method to bringing out the best in challenging children, particularly those diagnosed with “ADHD.” It is called the Nurtured Heart Approach® and its essence is that, in the words of our guest, “the same intensity that drives people crazy is actually the source of a child’s greatness."
A Nurse’s Nightmare: Child Nearly Dies from ADHD Drug
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.
Intensive Home Treatment for Acute Mental Disorders: An Alternative to Hospitalization
Unlike hospital treatment, IHT is attentive to family issues and helping negotiate re-entry into work or school. It is also consistent with the recovery principle of least intrusive interventions.
CRPD Consultation on Deinstitutionalization: A Reparations Approach
The UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has announced a series of regional consultations on deinstitutionalization.
Insane Medicine, Chapter 9: The Worried Parent (Part 1)
A discussion of a diagnosis-free approach to working with families called the Relational Awareness Program (RAP) and how family relationships become solidified through “Emotion WARS.”
Some Principles of Human Design for a Post-COVID World
This essay contributes a biologist’s perspective to identifying humanity’s fundamental needs in our necessary transition to a new world order.
An American History of Addiction, Part 5: Vietnam, Veterans, and Vermin
If addictions are existential, and not biological, at their core, then we can start to understand why addiction is not always chronically and progressively compulsive and obsessive.
Mainstream Mental Health Is Hazardous for Your Mental Health
"Mental health" going mainstream has not actually translated into more connection and healing. Instead, what is mainstream is an individual, isolating notion of "disease."
New Research Questions Safety of Esketamine for Depression
An analysis of FDA adverse event reports related to esketamine shows the potential for negative effects such as suicidal and self-injurious ideation.
Psychiatry and the Counterculture: An Interview with Health Historian Lucas Richert
Richard Sears interviews pharmaceutical industry scholar Lucas Richert about American counterculture and psychiatry in the 1970s.
Researchers: “Antidepressants Should Be Avoided in Bipolar Depression”
New research finds that antidepressants are not effective for bipolar disorder and can worsen symptoms of mania.
Attention! One Morning with a Roving Mind
The day was one long meditation—doing what the mind ordered with no effort to control it. This is the Zen state that monks seek but that physicians consider a mental disorder to be treated by amphetamines.
