Privacy & Surveillance

The president and president-elect of the American Psychological Association penned a letter to the New York Times calling on “Congress and other policy makers to address these factors with interventions supported by evidence rather than avoiding them by scapegoating the mentally ill.”

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...

Medical sociologist David Pilgrim argues that mental health care is neither effective nor “kindly,” as it often relies on flawed research and ineffective treatments.

The FDA has rejected the drug/device combination designed to monitor patient adherence with Abilify from Otsuka Pharmaceutical and Proteus Digital Health. Just last week...

Researchers explore pathways of healing racial trauma in Latinx immigrant communities.

The majority of universities require most or all employees to report disclosures of sexual assault, but these policies may be ineffective at addressing campus sexual violence and disempowering for survivors

The type of diagnostic assessment used in research settings, either fully structured or semi-structured interview, may affect which participants in receive a diagnosis of major depression.

John Albers was completely surprised when police came to his home at midnight and insisted on taking him to a psychiatric hospital, where he...

David Shern, from Johns Hopkins University, writes that the latest mental health “Murphy bill” in Congress is “an expansion of the approaches that got us into our current difficulties.” “Early intervention and prevention, assessable and patient-focused services with a rehabilitation orientation and increased funding for the community supports needed for successful recovery are the tickets to system improvement.”

A recent editorial, published in BMJ, argues there is an increase in coercive measures in psychiatry that are damaging to individuals diagnosed with mental illness.

Washington Post columnist Steven Petrow gets a friend recommendation from Facebook, and it turns out to be his current psychotherapist, who isn't using any...

Last Thursday, the FDA agreed to review a “digital pill,” combining a sensor with the antipsychotic Abilify, in order to track patients’ compliance with drug treatment. Patients taking the tracker pill would also wear a patch, which would receive information and relay it to a mobile device, according to a brief report by BioPharmaDIVE.

Wired examines some of the latest self-surveillance mobile apps that people are using to help themselves manage their own behaviors. "Through the discreet and...

From Nature: Two teams funded by the US military's research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), have begun preliminary trials of brain implants...

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

Researcher Dr. Silke Schwarz highlights how Western psychology’s construction of individual resilience deflects emphasized individual pathology and deflects efforts at structural change.

From MIT Technology Review: A new app, Triggr, is using smartphone data to track the behavior of people struggling with substance use and addiction, with...

From Neo.life: The emerging discipline of computational psychiatry, which aims to use machine-learning algorithms to recognize patterns of mental distress and identify treatments that may be...

New research questions whether the diagnosis of ADHD even meets the criteria for a disorder, as set out in the manuals used by the medical and psychiatric fields.

For the North Carolina Law Review, Katie Rose Guest Pryal writes, that “ a psychiatric diagnosis, or involuntary civil commitment to a psychiatric ward—which is...

The basic idea of the experiential democracy project is to supplement conventional legislative or other forms of diplomatic and moral deliberation with person-centered (“I-Thou”) principles of encounter. These principles, which derive from existential-humanistic psychology and person-centered therapy, stress the attempt to engage participants to more intimately understand each other, and through this context to more intimately understand each other’s often conflicting positions on issues of moral import.

From STAT: Last week, the House approved a bill that will grant employers access to employees' genetic test results and other health information. Article →­

Colorado police trained in crisis intervention infrequently use force or arrest individuals experiencing a mental health crisis and are likely to transfer individuals to a treatment facility.

Dennis Embry, a clinical psychologist and government consultant on mental health, shares a letter he sent to congressman Murphy warning him about how he may have been misled concerning his mental health bill. “I am specifically writing you about erroneous, false information you’ve been given about the National Registry of Evidence Base Programs and Practices. That erroneous information is likely to cause serious problems, which have been withheld from you.”

The rate of incarceration for lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals is roughly three times that of the general population and they experience significantly higher rates of victimization and mistreatment in prison.