MIA Reports

In-depth reporting on psychiatry and its impact on society.

Pathologized Since Eve: Jessica Taylor on Women, Trauma, and “Sexy but Psycho”

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Our guest today is Jessica Taylor, author of Sexy But Psycho: How the Patriarchy Uses Women’s Trauma Against Them, which was published in March...

The Path from Trauma to The Power of Nature: An Interview with Banning Lyon

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Our guest today is Banning Lyon, author of The Chair and The Valley: A Memoir of Trauma, Healing, and The Outdoors. An account of...

Soteria Israel: A Vision from the Past is a Blueprint for the Future

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In Israel, there is a budding Soteria movement that foretells of a possible paradigm shift in care. The thought is that such care may become a first-line treatment for newly psychotic patients.

MindFreedom’s Shield Program: Working to Free People from Psychiatric Incarceration and Forced Treatment

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“We need the MindFreedom Shield to have someone in our corner when we are told that it doesn't matter what we want, that someone else can make a choice about our bodies that we will have to live with for the rest of our lives.”

Psychology is Not What You Think: An Interview with Critical Psychologist Ian Parker

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MIA’s Ayurdhi Dhar interviews Ian Parker about critical psychology, discourse and political action, and whether psychology has anything left to offer.

Our Medical System Protects Wrongdoers and Punishes Whistleblowers: An Interview with Carl Elliott

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MIA’s Ayurdhi Dhar interviews Carl Elliott about scandals in psychiatry and the challenges faced by whistleblowers.

Beverley Thomson–Antidepressed: Antidepressant Harm and Dependence

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We talk with author Beverley Thomson about her latest book, entitled Antidepressed: A Breakthrough Examination of Epidemic Antidepressant Harm and Dependence.
the new yorker

The New Yorker Peers into the Psychiatric Abyss… And Loses Its Nerve

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The New Yorker's story on Laura Delano and psychiatric drug withdrawal is a glass-half-full story: It addresses a problem in psychiatry and yet hides the deeper story to be told. A story of how her recovery resulted from seeing herself within a counter-narrative that tells of the harm that psychiatry can do.

Deprescribing Psychiatric Drugs to Reduce Harms and Empower Patients: Interview with Psychiatrist Swapnil Gupta

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Ayurdhi Dhar interviews psychiatrist Swapnil Gupta on psychiatric drug discontinuation, drug cocktail risks, patient choice, and the need for trust and transparency.
AI-generated image of a snowy yeti and an ice-crusted double-helix

Searching for the “Psychiatric Yeti”: Schizophrenia Is Not Genetic

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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.

An FDA Whistleblower’s Documents: Commerce, Corruption, and Death

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In 2008, a reviewer of psychiatric drugs at the FDA, Ron Kavanagh, complained to Congress that the FDA was approving a new antipsychotic that was ineffective and yet had adverse effects that increased the risk of death. Twelve years later, a review of the whistleblower documents reveal an FDA approval process that can lead to the marketing of drugs sure to harm public health.

Psych Concepts Creep Into Our Everyday Experiences: An Interview with Nicholas Haslam

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MIA’s Ayurdhi Dhar interviews Nicholas Haslam about how psychiatric terms get diluted and creep into everyday language, altering our experiences.

When Healing Looks Like Justice: An Interview with Harvard Psychologist Joseph Gone

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MIA’s Ayurdhi Dhar interviews Joseph Gone about how a history of dispossession, conquest, and colonization shapes mental health outcomes in Native American communities.

Looking Beyond Self-Help to Understand Resilience: An Interview with Michael Ungar

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Ayurdhi Dhar interviews Michael Ungar about how complex systems make us vulnerable and how resilience emerges in context-specific ways.

Jill Nickens – The Akathisia Alliance for Education and Research

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This week on the Mad in America podcast we turn our attention to prescription-drug-induced akathisia and joining me to discuss this is Jill Nickens. Jill is the president and founder of the Akathisia Alliance for Education and Research, a nonprofit organization formed by people who have personal experience of akathisia.
Stock photo of wooden people and government building; people protesting

Maryland Enacts a “Draconian” Assisted Outpatient Treatment Program

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Advocates vow to keep resisting psychiatric force, fighting for rights-based supports
cartoon drawing of many eyes on red background

Mental Health Apps: AI Surveillance Enters Our World

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While the developers are promoting the apps as a public health initiative, they are effectively an AI that would be snooping on you at all times—ostensibly coming to know you better than you know yourself. And ultimately doing so for commercial purposes that will expand the psychiatric enterprise.

Psychiatry Defends Its Antipsychotics: A Case Study of Institutional Corruption

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Jeffrey LIeberman and colleagues have published a paper in the American Journal of Psychiatry stating that there is no evidence that psychiatric drugs cause long-term harm, and that the evidence shows that these drugs provide a great benefit to patients. A close examination of their review reveals that it is a classic example of institutional corruption, which was meant to protect guild interests.

Undisclosed Financial Conflicts of Interest in the DSM-5: An Interview with Lisa Cosgrove and...

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On the Mad in America podcast we talk with Lisa Cosgrove and Brian Piper about their BMJ paper entitled "Undisclosed Financial Conflicts of Interest in the DSM-5 TR: Cross-Sectional Analysis"

The Social Unconscious and Character Formation in Neoliberal Culture: An Interview with Lynne Layton

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MIA’s Javier Rizo interviews Lynne Layton about social psychoanalysis and how normative unconscious processes can help illuminate how oppressive systems get internalized and reproduced.

Cured: A Memoir—Sarah Fay on Giving Everyone the Chance to Heal

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Author Sarah Fay joins us to discuss why "cured" is such a seldom-used word in psychiatry.
A girl wearing virtual reality device over eyes looks startled with hands wide and mouth open

Why Failed Psychiatry Lives On: Its Industrial Complex, Politics, & Technology Worship

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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.
Photo of Diana Rose, wearing a pink sweater, smiling, in front of a bookshelf

Is Service-User Research Possible in Mental Health? An Interview with Diana Rose

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MIA’s Ayurdhi Dhar interviews Diana Rose about producing knowledge with survivors of psychiatry, abuses faced by service users, and what good research would look like.

The STAR*D Scandal: Scientific Misconduct on a Grand Scale

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The American Journal of Psychiatry Needs to Retract Study That Reported Fraudulent Results
Thomas Insel

Thomas Insel Makes A Case for Abolishing Psychiatry

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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.