Privacy & Surveillance

Today, Hillary Clinton’s campaign released their plan for addressing mental health care in the United States. The plan calls for a full integration of...

From Pacific Standard: It, the first feature-film adaptation of a 1986 horror novel by Stephen King, has broken box office records for the horror genre, making...

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.”

How does social network site use influence well-being? Researchers suggest this depends on the extent to which site use is “connection-promoting."

“The pharma industry loses tens of billions in worldwide sales each year when patients don’t fill, or refill, their prescriptions,” Rebecca Robbins reports for STAT. So...

Legislation is being advanced that would speed up the FDA’s approval process for new drugs and medical devices, according to a report by the Pacific Standard. Pharmaceutical and medical device companies have been lobbying heavily to reduce regulations and are winning over bipartisan support by attaching these measures to increased mental health funding.

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.

Psychologist Roy Eidelson comments on the Society for Military Psychology’s criticism of the Hoffman report, which exposed the collusion between the APA and the CIA’s torture program. He writes, “the leaders of APA’s military psychology division have offered a very dark vision for the profession of psychology – a vision that we must reject, both individually and institutionally.”

Emotional support, religion, and searching for meaning are positively correlated with posttraumatic growth among prisoners.

Last week, the FDA gave permission for ecstasy to move into Phase 3 clinical trials for the treatment of PTSD. “If they can keep...

In an opinion piece for care2, Katie Medlock discusses how “mental illness” awareness campaigns have shifted, dangerously, “and ended up insinuating that people with mental illness could turn on ‘us’ at any time and should be feared.”

Bloomberg Businessweek investigates the companies involved in buying and selling mass databases of people's prescription-drug histories, and the new ways in which that information is being used by skirting privacy protections.

Critical psychiatry researcher, anthropologist and NYU professor Helena Hansen writes: “Opioid maintenance acts as a kind of pharmaceutical prosthesis which promises to return white ‘addicts’ to regaining their status as full human persons and middle-class consumers. Meanwhile, black and brown users are not deemed as persons to be rescued, but rather dangerous subjects to be pharmaceutically contained within the public discipline of the state.”

ProPublica explains why a university mental health center contacted the estranged parents of a student over eighteen without her consent, and why another student’s personal counseling records were used against her in a sexual-assault investigation.

How people are treated after being hospitalized can either help them to overcome the traumatic effects of coercion or make them worse.

-The industry of mobile apps that diagnose users' physical and mental ailments is already worth some $4 billion.

“In Gallup's annual measure of 25 major U.S. business sectors, the percentage of Americans with a positive view of the pharmaceutical industry dropped from 40% in 2014 to 35% this year, while the percentage with a negative view rose from 36% to 43%.”

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

-"I knew my psychiatric practice was forever changed the day a patient arrived with a manila folder stuffed with printouts and announced that it contained the contents of a Google search that he had done on me."

In The Opinion Pages of the New York Times, Matthew Epperson discusses the devastating results of police acting as the primary responders to mental health crises. “If we are to prevent future tragedies, then we should be ready to invest in a more responsive mental-health system and relieve the police of the burden of being the primary, and often sole, responders.”

“At a time when Americans pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs, this bill provides absolutely no relief for...

"ISIS provides existential fast food, and for some of the most spiritually hungry young Westerners, ISIS is like a Big Mac amidst a barren wasteland of an existence,” Omar Hague writes in the Psychiatric Times. “Who actually joins ISIS? Not psychopaths or the brainwashed, but rather everyday young people in social transition, on the margins of society, or amidst a crisis of identity.”

Former president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR), Roy Eidelson discusses efforts to undermine the Hoffman report which revealed the American Psychologica Association’s collusion in torture. "First, from a familiar playbook, we have the obligatory attack on the patriotism of Hoffman and those who have criticized psychologists’ participation in abusive detention and interrogation operations,” he writes. “The most outrageous example comes from two retired military officers, David Bolgiano and John Taylor. In a recent piece they described the Hoffman Report as a ‘classic attack of cowards’ and also stated, ‘By the publication and release of this report, the APA becomes a willing co-conspirator to the likes of al Qaeda and ISIS.’”

In the New York Times, Natasha Singer discusses last year's launch by the Samaritans of an app that allowed people to track others' mental...

A new analysis of UK mental health data suggests the way organizations deliver mental health services can alter patient outcomes.