Issues

Major study finds that economic deprivation and a lack of social capital are driving increasing rates of suicide in the U.S.

A new study found that taking an antidepressant medication was associated with a heightened risk of suicide using violent means.

The Mad Pride movement continues to spread around the world, with a first-ever march in Mexico City.

They tell us we’re too fragile to speak our own truth, and that those around us are too fragile to hear it. If you must name what happened to you, at least slap a “trigger warning” on yourself, and don’t “paint a picture.” Fuck that. The truth is that graphic detail can make some of us stronger in a way that silence never could.

We encourage young people to see themselves as fragile creatures whose brains can go haywire for any reason, or no reason at all. Then we tell them they have the “disease” of depression and ply them with drugs with a known link to worsening depression and suicidality going back for decades. How many more will have to die before this changes?

Suicide prevention constructs a reality in which the problems of suicide lie within suicidal people. Sanity is constructed around wanting to live, insanity around wanting to die. Within this paradigm, the suicidal person can never be trusted. They are fragile, vulnerable, demanding protection, surveillance, and management.

Is it not the very capacity for suicide that makes us human? This capacity, this freedom, of autonomy’s jurisdiction to extend to the outermost seconds of life, namely death, is an innate part of humanity and thus consciousness. Accepting death as a possibility embraces the finitude of our existence.

Forty years after I had first been admitted to the hospital, I was ready to confront my past. So, I sent for my hospital records, and I read them. As an experienced clinician, I recognized immediately what the doctors hadn’t been able to see in 1960: my problem wasn’t ‘schizophrenia’ but PTSD, connected with incest.

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

Teacher’s personal wellbeing plays a role in students’ mental health outcomes, suggests a new study.

Understanding schizophrenia as a non-enigmatic, understandable human experience goes against a history of institutional “othering” that has sustained psychiatric legitimacy and further marginalized service-users.

As the world economic leader in GDP at $24 trillion per year, the United States has had steadily rising suicide rates for nearly two decades, though when compared to other economic leaders such as France, Germany, Japan, India, the UK and Italy, it remains the outlier; the rest have dropped. Why is the United States unique in its degree of misery?

Researchers shed light on hike in attempted suicide by self-poisoning in young adults between 2011 and 2018.

Research illustrates privacy concerns with how mental health applications collect and share users’ data.

Industry-funded continuing medical education (CME) influences physicians to prescribe more opioids, focus less on the consequences.

Researchers detect disparity between white and African American patients diagnosed with schizophrenia when symptoms of a mood disorder are present.

A new study examines the role parent borderline pathology plays in the perpetuation of childhood maltreatment.

Individuals who experience psychosis can also experience posttraumatic growth, which can be a central component of the recovery paradigm.

What physical activity-based programs are being implemented in schools, how are they being researched, and what kind of impact have they made?

A new study provides an insider’s look into how psychiatrists view the establishment of drug-free programs in Norway.

New research suggests that minimum wage laws provide financial security that may help prevent suicide.

New data interpreted to suggest a hierarchical, dimensional system of mental disorders will aid future research efforts and improve mental health care.

Debate ensues as scholars and policymakers discuss how to bring a rights-based approach to mental health policy.

Knowing the client’s history can help foster genuine empathic responding, a key component to child-centered play therapy.

A new study suggests proximity to green space as a child is linked to lower rates of mental health issues in adulthood.