MIA Today

Mental distress is often perceived as something devoid of context, as an individual medical condition or a failure instead of a human condition linked to the social context one exists in.

From The Independent: Survivors of the Hill End Hospital Adolescent Unit in St Albans, UK, said they were sexually abused, filmed during strip searches, beaten, punched and sedated as a punishment.

Medically-induced harm—affecting tens of millions of people worldwide—has taken the field decades to take seriously.

We now spend over twenty billion dollars a year on treatment for something called “ADHD.” For that amount of money, we could pay the mid-career salaries of an extra 365,000 teachers or 827,000 teachers’ aides.

A new study finds that anticholinergic drugs, like antidepressants and antipsychotics, are associated with mild cognitive decline.

Wherever you find mental health services to have expanded, you find a parallel increase in the numbers who have been classed as disabled due to a mental health disorder.

From The Guardian: Health experts and charities have said that lockdown uncertainty, fear, isolation and loneliness will be exacerbated by the colder and darker months ahead.

Researchers review a new synthesis of the existing evidence and conclude that the harms of antidepressants outweigh any benefits.

Legal and practical barriers to voting disenfranchise people judged "mentally incompetent." The centuries-old, unclear laws and regulations also disproportionately affect people of color.

From NBC News: The state Board of Social Work Examiners voted to change a section of its code of conduct last week following a recommendation from Gov. Greg Abbott.

There is clear evidence of a double standard and attitude that favors and privileges one side of the binary—the clinicians—over peers. This discrimination must be made visible and revealed to mental health advocates and changemakers.

Coupled with a burgeoning new movement (AA) for temperance members to refer to, the movement changed from a public policy interest group to what we would now call a treatment-based outreach organization.

From The Guardian: An inquest in 2018 ruled that the use of olanzapine was appropriate but the McGowans have now called for a fresh inquest, saying the first was “deeply flawed.”

Soteria House’s history is complex and fascinating. Soteria Houses have never had the support they needed, but they still managed to change so many lives.

Megan Wildhood discusses the flaws in phrases like "fake it till you make it," "you can choose how you feel," and "no one is responsible for your life but you."

I am not immune to what I call weaponized empathy, which I see as the pure intention of compassion for another tainted with aggression around eradicating pain, pain that could be a source of growth for the sufferer if allowed to arise and pass away without force.

The concepts we use have undermined our natural resilience, sensitised us to an idea of our vulnerability, and encouraged us to transfer our agency to practitioners who use a system as if it has scientific validity and is clinically useful.

From Rethinking Psychiatry: Voyce will discuss his time at the original Soteria House in San Jose, CA, an alternative to the medical model for schizophrenia that ran from 1971 to 1983.

Public mental health authorities continue to oppress persons with psychosocial conditions through a combination of punitive and discriminatory laws that are constructed with a "best interests" paradigm in mind and a medical model that pathologises difference and dissent. 

From Scientific American: John Horgan interviews Robert Whitaker about how his views have evolved since publishing Anatomy of an Epidemic in 2010.

Please join us on Friday, October 23 for OpenExcellence, HOPENDialogue, and Mad in America’s ongoing Town Hall conversation about what Open Dialogue is — and is becoming.

From Novara Media: The government’s flagship talking therapy service, Improving Access to Psychological Therapies, has become an empire, offering assembly-line state therapy to a society suffering the mental ill-health of neoliberal capitalism.

A new study finds that adding an antipsychotic to existing antidepressant treatment is associated with a 45% increased risk of early death.

From ProPublica Illinois: “There’s not a whole lot that tells a kid you don’t matter [more] than keeping them locked up in a psych ward for no reason other than there’s nowhere to place them for months on end."

MIA's Madison Natarajan interviews Natalie Campo about integrative psychiatry and holistic approaches to drug tapering and withdrawal.