MIA Reports

A dialogue between Dr. Jim Phelps—a psychiatrist who questions whether MIA is doing more harm than good by reporting the results of long-term trials of psychiatric drugs—and Robert Whitaker, founder of MIA.

An interview with Vanessa Green, executive director of Call BlackLine a nationally recognized hotline serving BIPOC and LGBTQI communities.

Revealing concerns about BetterHelp’s ability to provide quality, secure treatment—and the unresolved tensions in the science of psychotherapy that services like BetterHelp exploit.

Disability Rights California will challenge Los Angeles’ Assisted Outpatient Treatment program in court this fall, DRC attorney Pamela Cohen announced Friday. According to Cohen, California’s AB-1241 or “Laura’s Law” diverts funding from community mental health services and towards police, administrators and courts, doesn’t reach the people it purports to be trying to help, and violates people’s civil rights. “This is an illegal program,” said Cohen.

MIA’s Samantha Lilly interviews critical youth suicidologist Jennifer White about what suicide prevention could look like outside of the medical model.

Anders Sørenson is a Danish clinical psychologist with a special interest in psychiatric drug withdrawal. He has undertaken research which assesses the state of guidance on psychiatric drug withdrawal and paid close attention to tapering methods with the aim of identifying approaches which might make withdrawal more tolerable for people.

Morgan Shields discussed her experiences in inpatient psychiatry and her efforts to bring patient-centered care to this oft-neglected field.

Dr. Raskin discusses psychotherapists’ dissatisfaction with current psychiatric diagnostic systems and explores alternatives.

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.

MIA’s Ayurdhi Dhar interviews Dana Becker about how therapeutic culture fails to adequately address women’s suffering.

Anthropologist Zhiying Ma explores mental health care in China, including tensions between Western psychiatry and socially-oriented local frameworks.

At times I tend to feel invisible. Sometimes I don’t feel like I fit in with everyone else; I feel like an outsider.

MIA's Gavin Crowell-Williamson interviews the neuropsychologist and novelist Jussi Valtonen about how novels can lead us to see the limits of our understanding.

An interview with composer Dawn Sonntag and librettist Kermit Cole about their new opera about the harms that can come from psychiatric drugs.

Donzaleigh Abernathy—goddaughter of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.—shares her thoughts on the civil rights movement and the legacy of racism in the United States.

When Carina Håkansson sent out an invitation for a symposium on "Pharmaceuticals: Risks and Alternatives," some of the world's top scientists, along with experts-by-experience, came from 13 countries to explore better ways to respond to people in crisis.

Has the global mental health movement truly reformed its tone-deaf universalist attitudes?

Neil Gong exposes the false choice in mental health policy between tolerant containment for the poor and paternalistic surveillance for the rich.

An interview with Hans Skott-Myhre on the seeds of post-capitalist subjectivity to be found in the writing of Franco Basaglia and R.D. Laing.

The research literature from the WHO, NIMH, and others does not support a narrative of therapeutic progress, of psychiatric treatments that have “continued” to improve over time.

Psychiatry is now claiming that research has shown that antipsychotics reduce mortality among the seriously mentally ill. A critical review of the literature reveals that this claim is best described as the the field's latest "delusion" about the merits of these drugs.

Chris Bullard is the executive-director of the Sound Mind Live Festival which uses music as a connective force to bring people together to help address mental health stigma.

The reporter explains how air and water pollution affect our brains, why children are so vulnerable, and what to do about it.

Meet another talented teen behind the pieces in MIA's art exhibition. She writes: "This poem was written in my first year at a queer-positive school and is processing the new forms of guilt and shame I experienced and was exposed to."

After Joanna Moncrieff and colleagues published their study debunking the low-serotonin theory of depression, the editor of Mad in Sweden, Lasse Mattila, wrote Sweden’s...