Essays

Respondents described the grief and rage associated with being socially isolated while healing from childbirth and caring for a newborn, in some cases, entirely on their own.

Psychiatry has acknowledged its history of racism, but can they ever acknowledge that the entire edifice is built on fundamental bigotry?

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.

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).

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?

After decades of study, billions of dollars spent, and thousands of studies conducted, the failure to identify any genes for schizophrenia should definitively put to rest the notion that schizophrenia is a genetic disorder, according to E. Fuller Torrey.

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 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.

Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder (HPPD) is one of the after-effects neglected amid the rapid march of the psychedelic renaissance. But is the impulse to pathologise these perceptual changes helpful?

A new documentary about gay activists' defeat of the APA ends with a disclaimer that ECT is "effective" for severe depression. Bruce Levine spoke with the filmmakers.

By embracing the widely popular technology-worship “religion,” psychiatry is permitted to ignore the reality that its repeated failures are evidence that its fundamental paradigm is misguided.

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.

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.

Unbiased experts must examine the claims and research of psychiatry and issue a report as to whether psychiatry not only has a valid medical basis, but whether this basis justifies the widespread violation of medical ethics and the routine use of imprisonment and torture.

This is a call that challenges how psychiatry is practiced today and ultimately challenges its power in society.

Service-users' experience was at the heart of everything the critics spoke about, as well as the importance of relying on the most up-to-date and accurate evidence.

The New York Times published yet again the fraudulent result from the STAR*D trial. Will the mainstream media ever tell of this scandal?

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

I will begin with a story of my youth. Then I will explore what my life has looked like since my release from custody. Finally, I will offer my own perspective on the country’s problems with gun violence, articulated from my unique positionality.

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.

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.

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

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.

A new study finds that those with mild distress are three times as likely to feel worse after therapy than to receive some benefit.