Globalization

Researchers explore neoliberal influences on interactions in psychotherapy and question whether the radical potential of psychotherapy can counter prevailing social systems.

Study finds that traditional healers in South Africa, whose services are widely used by the country’s population, perform important suicide prevention work.

Without clarity and consensus around what social justice means, psychologists risk perpetuating injustices that undermine their stated mission.

Are White Americans’ poor mental health outcomes caused by Whiteness?

Trauma-informed approaches have the potential to promote recovery but must involve survivors and service-users to prevent the experience of retraumatization within psychiatric and mental health services.

Barbara Ehrenreich weighs in on mass-market mindfulness, Silicon Valley, Buddhism- sliced up and commodified.

As the Global Mental Health Movement attempts to address cross-cultural mental health disparities, a new article encourages integrating traditional healing practices with psychotherapy.

CBT forwards a hyper-rational perspective of human suffering that complements a managerialist culture of efficiency and institutionalization in the Western world.

In a new report, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to health, Dr. Dainius Pūras, calls for a move away from the biomedical model and “excessive use of psychotropic medicines.”

A new study finds that sponsors of clinical trials in the EU continue to fail at reporting their results as required by recent legislation.

False beliefs about biological differences between races are associated with a failure to provide recommended pain treatments to Black people.

A diet rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, and fish has repeatedly been found to improve mental health.

“Overall, this study showed that the information and awareness campaign had almost no significant effects on the general public's attitudes toward people affected by either schizophrenia or depression,” the researchers, led by German medical sociologist Anna Makowski, wrote. “One could assume that deeply rooted convictions cannot be modified by rather time-limited and general activities targeted at the public.”

Derek Summerfield, consultant psychiatrist at South London and Maudsley National Health Service Foundation Trust, challenges the assumption that Western depression is a universal condition.

While well intentioned, providers and volunteers can do more harm than good at the border. The Global Psychosocial Network issues guidelines on how to work for the benefit of migrants and refugees.

Contemporary empirical research explores new ways to conceptualize and heal racial trauma through anticolonial and sociohistorical lenses.

A new study suggests needing to appear perfect to others leads to mental health stigma and a higher risk of untreated psychological distress.

Ethnographic research sheds light on extensive psychopharmaceutical use by soldiers in post 9/11 U.S. wars.

A re-visioned approach to social psychiatry aims to understand the broad influence of social life on mental health.

Canadian study finds that social service spending is associated with a decrease in mortality and increase in life expectancy.

Researchers find evidence of low socio-economic status White Americans’ rising distress and declining well-being since the mid-1990s.

Cross-cultural data suggest that happiness involves feeling the emotions one deems as right, in accordance with personal and cultural values.

The use of machine learning algorithms (known as artificial intelligence) in the medical field raises a slew of ethical concerns.

In many respects it is difficult to fault the report Understanding Psychosis and Schizophrenia, recently published by the British Psychological Society (BPS) and the Division of Clinical Psychology (DCP)[i]; indeed, as recent posts on Mad in America have observed, there is much to admire in it. Whilst not overtly attacking biomedical interpretations of psychosis, it rightly draws attention to the limitations and problems of this model, and points instead to the importance of contexts of adversity, oppression and abuse in understanding psychosis. But the report makes only scant, fleeting references to the role of cultural differences and the complex relationships that are apparent between such differences and individual experiences of psychosis.

New meta-analysis of smartphone based interventions demonstrates small-to-moderate effect.