MIA Today

Headlines of Today's Posts

Shot of a young man comforting his peer on the steps

Sober Living: Why Less Clinical Sometimes Means More Recovery

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Real independence is where most people stumble. Treatment can’t replicate what it’s like to live sober in the chaos of everyday life.

CANNOT CONTINUE’: NYC Law Would Allow Officials to Commit Drug Addicts

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From Fox News: Investigative journalist Rob Wipond joins 'Fox & Friends Weekend' to discuss a New York City proposal to involuntarily commit drug addicts.
Collage of a complex person reduced to wooden blocks and post it notes of happy and sad faces

The Psychological Totalization of Experience: Objectification and Subjectivity

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I must be a mechanistic, predictable unit, in order for a psychiatric label or a psychological variable to be implemented on me smoothly.
An elderly woman in a wheelchair tells a doctor (out of focus) about her symptoms

ECT: New Studies Detail Harms, Lack of Efficacy, Lack of Informed Consent

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What people who have received ECT really think about what they were told, and about how ECT affected them.
BW photo. Man in a suit telling children

Narrative Reclamation: Who’s Allowed to Tell Their Story?

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Narratives have the power to lock us up—sometimes literally. But they also have the power to set us free.

How to be a Critical Psychologist Without Losing Your Soul: A Conversation With Zenobia...

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On the Mad in America podcast, Zenobia Morrill, José Giovanni Luiggi-Hernández and Justin Karter join us to explore the need to raise awareness of psychological approaches that challenge mainstream perspectives.
Unhappy man and group of people behind his back indoors. Therapy session

Reflections on My Mistrust for Other Mental Health Workers

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I learned to hold my tongue around mental health workers. I dealt with their slurs by working harder and longer than them.
A hand puts lipstick and a face on a risperidone bottle

Confessions of an Ad Writer: How I Helped Turn Atypical Antipsychotics into a Billion-Dollar...

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How we redefined schizophrenia, rewrote the safety narrative of antipsychotics, and helped drive one of the most successful (and concerning) pharmaceutical launches in history.

Illinois is the First State to Ban AI Therapists

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From Engadget: "Illinois Governor JB Pritzker has signed a bill into law banning AI therapy in the state. This makes Illinois the first state...
A writer and a military veteran: two versions of the same man sit on a chair

Two Voices and One Chair

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It’s a war between two voices. The writer’s voice shapes, composes, imagines. The trauma’s voice: raw, insistent, unfiltered, breaking in.
Paper head with brain and pills on red background

Antipsychotics—And How I’ve Learned to Manage the Side Effects

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While suppressing pathological symptoms, drugs also suppress the normal instinct of "wanting to move" and "wanting to enjoy life".
Close-up of a person covered in white paint with gold cracks, kintsugi style

It’s the Cracked Ones Who Let the Light in

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The identified patient is often the healthiest: a lighthouse desperately pointing the way to the wounds and power imbalances in the family.
A magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat labeled "Forced Treatment"

The Deceptive Politics of Civil Commitment in Oregon

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A workgroup in Oregon unanimously recommended rights-based mental health care. Then the politicians and those invested in forced treatment splintered off and implemented the exact opposite.
A person is in the spotlight. A wooden figure of a man. People lie around.

Treat Systems, Not Symptoms: Defending the Sanity of the Oppressed

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Pathologizing distress benefits psychiatry, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies, but dampens responses that could dismantle oppression.

Is Dialogue the Best Medicine? A Conversation With Jaakko Seikkula

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Jaakko Seikkula joins us on the MIA podcast to discuss how Open Dialogue came to be, the research that shows its positive outcomes, how psychiatry has failed to learn from Open Dialogue practice and more.
Crumpled papers in a trashcan

Cochrane Recommends Antidepressants for Anxiety in a Garbage In, Garbage Out Review

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Cochrane's review of antidepressants for anxiety is misleading and harmful.
Enraged crowd of people are behind bars. Fence wire mesh barbed wire, vector silhouette. Street camera on the pillar. Sunset background.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

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Society’s practice of physically segregating privileged people from those they deem to be “less than” has deep roots beginning with the treatment of madness.
Simple single family house with words "Peer Respite " over the front door, with a sign hanging from the doorknob saying "Closed."

America is Legislating a Return to the Asylum, One Policy at a Time

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Federal and state policymakers across the partisan divide are defunding vital programs and rolling back policies and rights protections.
Miniature shot. People crowded in the lower right corner, walking

Where Did All the People Go?

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The question that this history will try to answer is how Oregonian lives were affected by deinstitutionalization, in three phases.

FDA’s Artificial Intelligence is Supposed to Revolutionize Drug Approvals. It’s Making up Studies

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From CNN. "To hear health officials in the Trump administration talk, artificial intelligence has arrived in Washington to fast-track new life-saving drugs to market,...

FDA Expert Panel on Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) and Pregnancy

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An FDA expert roundtable on Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) and pregnancy to facilitate discussions on the safety of the developing child. Held on...
A magnifying glass and pen on charts and data

An Approach to Making Sense of Psychiatric Research

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I don’t consider myself a scientist in the usual sense, but I know a lot about what makes scientific findings more valid and useful.

Subpatterns: A Deeper Dive into Attachment Theory

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Psychological issues have their roots in childhood and are linked to the attachment patterns we develop early in life.

Grossly Flawed Paper Denies that Antidepressant Withdrawal Effects are “Clinically Meaningful”

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Pharma-funded researchers are endangering patient safety by minimising the incidence and severity of withdrawal.
Doctor explaining something to patient

Brain Disorders or Problems with Living? How Research on “Mental Illness” Went Awry

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Is it time to consider the possibility that the entire field is a failed enterprise, a wrong turn in human history?