Go/No-Go—How Mental Health Research Took a Wrong Turn: An Interview with Author Marianne Apostolides
Marianne Apostolides discusses how Go/No-Go grew from her search for new eating-disorder treatments into a critique of the metaphors, experiments, and technologies shaping contemporary neuroscience and psychiatry. She argues that efforts to reduce distress to circuits, algorithms, and biomarkers often overlook subjectivity, agency, and the human relationships that meaningful care requires.
How Psychiatry Launders Our Debts: An Interview with Khameer Kidia
Physician-anthropologist Khameer Kidia examines how violence and inequality shape mental distress, arguing for patient autonomy, community care, and structural change beyond diagnosis, medication, and individualized psychiatric treatment.
How Can Soccer Coaching Help People Who Hear Voices?
Voice hearing might be conceptualised as reflecting disowned or dissociated aspects of self, often occurring as a result of life events.
Faith, Culture, and Coercion: An Interview with Cultural Psychiatrist G. Eric Jarvis
Cultural psychiatrist G. Eric Jarvis discusses religion and mental health, the social determinants of psychosis, and how coercive treatment can deepen mistrust in psychiatric care.
The Fight for the Soul of Psychotherapy: An Interview with Linda Michaels
Linda Michaels is a psychologist in private practice in Chicago and a co-founder of the Psychotherapy Action Network (PsiAN).
She trained at the Illinois...
Why Mental Health Is Not the Same for Everyone
There is such a thing as mental health, but it is not the same for everyone. It is a subjective good that depends on a person’s own standards.
How Our Blindness to Context Harms Patients and Breaks Practitioners: A Conversation With Kamaldeep...
Kamaldeep Bhui joins us to challenge the myth of clinical neutrality, arguing that culture informs not only patients’ experiences of distress but also clinicians’ judgments about what counts as pathology. From voice-hearing to addiction, meaning depends on context, class, belief systems, and power relations.
Facing Existential Challenges, WHO Shuts Down its Policy, Law, and Human Rights Unit
Global activists react to the news and vow to keep up the fight for human rights in mental health.
UberTherapy and the Enshittification of our Relational Lives: Part 2 of our Interview with...
Elizabeth Cotton traces how digital therapy can block the very thing people come for: a stable, human relationship that can hold fear, dependency, and ambivalence.
UberTherapy and the Enshittification of our Relational Lives: Part 1 of our Interview with...
With UberTherapy, Elizabeth Cotton follows the gig-economy playbook into psychotherapy, where platforms lower costs by depressing wages and standardizing treatment.
Groupthink in Mainstream and Critical Psychiatry
Critical psychiatry should continue to point out where mainstream psychiatry falls short, but mainstream psychiatry must correct itself.
Why Critical Mental Health Knowledge Is Essential for Ethical Practice: An Interview with Jan...
In this conversation, Jan DeFehr argues that ethical practice requires access to what the field itself disputes, including the risks people rarely hear about.
ADHD Diagnoses, Examining the Psyche, Withdrawal and PSSD Risks, ECT Harms and More: Robert...
In our first podcast of 2026, Robert Whitaker joins us to answer questions submitted by Mad in America readers and listeners. We discuss the validity of ADHD diagnoses, withdrawal and sexual dysfunction risks of SSRI antidepressants, the harms of electro-convulsive therapy (ECT), the rise of AI-generated misinformation and much more.
To Be Agents of Our Own Treatment: Demedicalization at the Heart of the Inner...
We are fighting for transparency, accountable science, and for the rights of the common people who are misinformed, as we require informed consent.
Psychiatry’s Rightwing and Progressive Bigotries: How Each Enables the Megamachine
Whether in Nazi fascism, Soviet totalitarian communism, or U.S. corporate capitalism, psychiatry has been an enabler of the megamachine.
Nearly All ECT Recipients Report Negative Effects, Study Finds
A new international online survey published in the Journal of Affective Disorders gives voice to the lived experiences of people who have undergone electroconvulsive...
Mad in America’s 10 Most Popular Articles in 2025
A roundup of Mad in America's most read blogs and personal stories of 2025 as chosen by our readers.
In Defense of Instability in Mental Health Recovery
Limiting someone’s dreams based on a professional opinion of what is possible for people with serious mental illnesses is misguided at best.
Anti-inflammatory Drugs Fail for Depression
Response and remission rates failed to beat placebo in a new Harvard meta-analysis, throwing the inflammation hypothesis into question.
The Missing History of Children’s Mental Health in Oregon
It seems fitting that this history of mental health ends with Oregon’s attempt to grapple with the needs of children and families.
All in the Family: My Unlikely Connection To Nick, Rob and Michele Reiner
As a certified paranoid schizophrenic who inadvertently took my own mother’s life while going through my first major psychotic breakdown, I feel a great deal of empathy toward Nick Reiner.
The Gentrification of Social Work: Why a “Political Mental Health” Must be Public
It's hypocrisy to speak of equity and advocacy yet remain silent about the changes within that privilege affluent communities/professionals.
Addressing the Twofold Mental Health Crisis in New York City
The focus on crisis work displaces our attention and resources onto the symptomatic rather than the essential issues.
Childhood Trauma and Recent Stressors Rarely Addressed; ECT Given Instead
Mental health services force electroshock, rarely asking about causes like childhood adversities and recent stressors; few receive therapy.
We Must Stop the ADHD Prescribing Cascade, Not Perpetuate It
There is no scientific evidence base for routine use of multiple psychiatric drugs, particularly for children.
