Issues

-National Journal reports that some Republican and Conservative senators alike recognize a need for gun control legislation, but say it's easier to focus on restrictive mental health regulations instead.

-Vox interviews Jonathan Metzl about his research into the relationships -- and lack thereof -- between gun violence and mental illness.

-Interviews with people who murdered their own loved ones while taking SSRI antidepressants are included in the documentary, "Dark Side of a Pill."

-"The push for long-term care facilities to abandon the use of off-label use of antipsychotic medications for residents with dementia will intensify over the next two years."

Several years after the information was first revealed, a published study has shown how an influential NIMH study doctored the real data about antidepressants and suicidal events in youth.

-For indigenous peoples, the modern mental health system in North America often represents little more than a new form of colonialism and domination, writes David Walker.

-Rachel Aviv writes about the physician-assisted euthanizing of a Belgian woman who decided to kill herself because she had long suffered in depression.

-Anthea Butler hopes that the common media narrative portraying mass shooters as "lone, disturbed or mentally ill young men failed by society" does not supplant discussions of the deep racism that still exists in America.

-Discussion of the Charleston massacre was very different in Salon, Fox, and Newsweek.

Representative Murphy has released the second version of the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act (H.R. 2646). Few can argue that the mental health system and the current approach towards helping individuals and families in crisis are abysmal. H.R. 2646 is an effort to create increased service provisions and to enhance interventions that many professionals, family members and service users alike believe to be effective. When people are desperate and suffering they do not wish to be told "Sorry, there's nothing we can do." And so, it is understandable and even laudable that so many support the proposals laid out in H.R. 2646. But the bill is based on distorted and faulty logic that misrepresents the research and evidence base. This is highly disconcerting. And so a collective of mental health professionals, mental health advocates, and persons with lived experience came together to produce the following documents in response to H.R. 2646.

-Thomas Moore of the Institute for Safe Medication Practices asks, "What has been learned about electronic health data as a primary data source for regulatory decisions regarding the harms of drugs?"

University of Groningen researchers analyzed only small, short-term clinical trials of generally poor quality to determine that antipsychotics are not linked to increased risk of death in elderly people with dementia.

Taking antidepressant or benzodiazepine medications increases the risks that a person will commit a homicide, according to a study from Finland published in a World Psychiatry letter.

The man who deliberately crashed a Germanwings commercial airliner with 150 passengers aboard was actively in psychiatric treatment at the time, reported the New...

-Some nursing homes are changing their approaches since the US federal government began more closely regulating the use of antipsychotic medications in elderly patients with dementia.

A meta-analysis of studies found that the risk of dementia increased 22% for every additional twenty daily doses of benzodiazepine medications annually.

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

-Is the psychiatric approach hindering understanding of feelings that were historically more often seen as having "theological, philosophical, legal, and aesthetical" import?

-London, England's Maytree Suicide Respite Centre runs with a few paid staff and nearly a hundred volunteers.

-The 2014 New Zealand General Social Survey showed many New Zealanders feel more comfortable having neighbors with different sexual orientations or from minority groups than with mental illness.

-Correspondence in The Lancet Psychiatry suggests that a study linking depression to acts of violence should have examined antidepressant medications as possible causes.

-"Aboriginal youth are nine times more likely to be depressed and three times more likely to think about suicide compared to non-aboriginal youth."

-In a Canadian survey, 42% of psychiatrists said that if they developed a mental disorder, they would not disclose it to family or friends.

-Many New Zealand members of parliament believe that a majority of the people who contact them with "inappropriate" communications are mentally ill.

How we think about health, happiness, and self-fulfillment, how they are linked with flawed systems of government has been assigned to the domain of social scientists. The most influential of those are the psychiatrists who have been given the government-mandated power to diagnose, incarcerate and forcibly drug those who are perceived to have a form of mental illness. I believe that such power is arbitrary, unjust and frequently harmful.