Essays

If the Brackeen v. Halland case is successful, Native children are more likely to be placed with non-Native foster parents, and face a surge in psychiatric labeling and drugging.

Being stuck in the custody of a malicious treatment team could mean death. I had to resort to the Mother of All Tactics Hegemony (a lawsuit).

You had better be able to back up what you say with enough force to overcome any opposition; this rule applies to both inmates and staff.

In the detention center, there is really no better tool to overcome the constant threat of death than equanimity. Meditation was my antidote to hopelessness.

For decades, psychiatry committed medical fraud when it told the public that antidepressants fixed a chemical imbalance in the brain.

Harrow's research over the years told of how long-term antipsychotic use is associated with worse outcomes, even after controlling for psychosis severity.

Reviews of four recent books reflecting various perspectives on the mental health system, including explorations of the DSM and Open Dialogue.

Stories of a state hospital leader who challenged the mental health system by placing patients as the most important people: Dr. Dean K. Brooks of Oregon State Hospital.

Sean Gunderson, who was detained by the criminal justice system for 17 years after receiving an NGRI verdict, documents the life of a forensic psychiatry inmate.

Psychiatry's defenders are open to criticism of psychiatry as long as it stops short of acknowledging the increasingly well-documented reality that psychiatry lacks any scientific merit.

I was not going to earn my release the “traditional” way through unquestioning obedience to the treatment team and ADMIN. I was either going to die in there or find a non-traditional path to my freedom.

Even those who would seek to reform the profession of psychiatry cannot confront the reality that exists in the research literature

The "science" of happiness has always been inextricably linked to eugenics. Modern positive psychology, with its focus on genetics and willpower, is no different.

In his new book, former NIMH director Thomas Insel, while exploring the causes of poor mental health outcomes in the United States, omits any mention of NIMH studies that tell of how the drugs worsen long-term outcomes.

As contacts to the new 988 suicide hotline number have risen, so have call tracing and police interventions.

A TV writer claims that research shows that Tetris is “literally a trauma first aid kit.” Her tweets sound scientific, but the research behind it is unconvincing.

Now I’m under attack, with threats of violence flung at me alongside threats of lawsuits. And all because I shared the large body of peer-reviewed research that contradicts the mainstream assumptions of psychiatry.

To strip psychedelic use down to its chemicals is to de-radicalize its communal and anti-authoritarian roots. Given psychiatry’s history of treatment outcome failure and its ethically compromising financial relationships with Big Pharma, is it really a good idea to make psychiatry the societal authority in charge of psychedelic use?

How did that young Puerto Rican girl who very much disliked seeing a therapist when locked up in the juvenile system end up working in the mental health field as an adult?

As mainstream mental health ideas and approaches are increasingly incorporated by community resilience-building groups, critics warn about the dangers of pathologizing and medicalizing reactions to climate change.

Life in the DC was far too complicated for me to be able to just listen to my body and sleep on a thick yoga mat placed on the floor to alleviate my severe back pain.

How the unrelated murder of an inmate on another unit led to Sean's transfer, his escape from forced medication, and eventually, his release.

A dialogue between Jim Phelps and Robert Whitaker about Nassir Ghaemi's latest article, which concluded that psychiatric drugs, except for lithium, do not provide a long-term benefit.

Leading figures in psychiatry acknowledge that DSM psychiatric diagnoses and the chemical imbalance theory of mental illness are not scientifically valid, but are useful fictions that help people manage their emotions and comply with their medication treatments.

All the new hype about miracle psychedelic treatments as the next wave of cures for mental disorders leaves out the risk of therapy abuse.