Issues

As I walked alone up the stairs to the Rayburn House Office Building this morning to attend the hearing of the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health on H.R. 3717 - the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act - I thought about how I wasn’t truly alone. In spirit with me were all the people who had experienced scary, coercive, and dehumanizing interventions in the name of help. In spirit with me was every mental health provider who went into the field hoping to really make a difference in their communities, but became cynical and discouraged in the face of so many broken systems and broken spirits.

Re-examination of meta-analytic claims finds the prevalence of pediatric bipolar disorder is close to zero.

-Medical professor Norman Paradis gives a primer on the poor reliability of even the best screening tests -- let alone psychological ones.

A new report on pediatric bipolar critically examines the current evidence base and calls for more research before the diagnosis is used.

In this piece for The Guardian, Susie Orbach argues that we should not turn to the DSM to understand ourselves, but instead to the work of...

From Thinking Person's Guide to Autism: For decades, autistic and developmentally disabled people have been conditioned and coerced into behaving like neurotypical people, including suppressing...

Psychiatrist Dan Fisher's "opposing view" in USA Today makes the case — from a mental health perspective — against repealing the Affordable Care Act, which has...

New research out of the United Kingdom examines the cumulative impact of systemic racism on the mental health of minorities over time.  The study,...

From The Courier-Journal: Last week, Kentucky's General Assembly voted to overturn Governor Matt Bevin's veto of Tim's Law, a mental health law that allows a...

Questions have been circulating about whether Adam Lanza had been taking psychotropic medications. We hope that the inquiry into the mass murder will determine what psychotropic medications he may have been on. Meanwhile, Catherine Clarke and Jan Evans research paper "Neuroleptic Drugs and Violence" is archived on Madinamerica, and may shed further light on why this question arises in the context of these terrible events.

From Fortune: The global rate of depression has risen more than 18 percent since 2005. In 2015, the World Health Organization estimated that 322 million people...

...but how realistic is it to expect that the biological skew of Western psychiatry can be sustainably changed one small step at a time?

This week an FDA advisory panel decided to remove warnings of serious psychiatric side effects from the Chantix product label. “In making its recommendation,...

Psych Central covers findings published in BMJ revealing that many people in the U.K. with intellectual disabilities are being prescribed antipsychotic drugs. The study’s lead author comments: “People who show problem behaviors, along with older people with intellectual disability or those with co-existing autism or dementia, are significantly more likely to be given an antipsychotic drug, despite this being against clinical guidelines and risking possible harm.”

In this piece for Tales from the Madhouse, Gary Sidley critiques the Mental Health Act as a form of legal discrimination against people deemed "mentally...

New York Times columnist, Nicholas Kristof, relates the story of Andrew Francesco, a boy who began taking Ritalin at age five and died from complications with Seroquel when he was fifteen. His father, a former pharmaceutical industry executive, reveals the industry’s greed in his memoir “Overmedicated and Undertreated.” Now the industry is pushing for a first-amendment right to market its drugs for off-label uses.

From The Nation: In two new books, Foucault: The Birth of Power and Foucault's Last Decade, Stuart Elden investigates some of the unexplored aspects of Michel Foucault's...

Recommendations on how to provide trauma-informed, short-term counseling to college students who have experienced sexual assault and interpersonal violence.

From the Miami New Times: On June 23rd, 2012, four corrections officers at Dade Correctional Institution kept Darren Rainey, a black man labeled with schizophrenia,...

Researchers provide an action-planning framework to engage providers in the reduction of low-value healthcare.

Honor Whiteman reports on a study in The Journal of Counseling & Development, which found that people may be less tolerant of an individual...

In this piece for The Atlantic, Chris Millard discusses how increased medical, psychiatric, and psychoanalytic scrutiny of motherhood in the 20th century set the stage...

In a new article for Scientific American, Diana Kwon reports on how the true risks for suicide and aggression in children and teens taking...

In this piece for The New Yorker, Jia Tolentino discusses how the gig economy driven by apps such as Uber and Lyft leads employees to overwork...

From EDS and Chronic Pain News & Info: Recent legislation has proposed measures that permit people to be involuntarily committed on the basis of perceived...