MIA Today

From Psychology Today: Psychology is dominated by a worldview most of the world does not have. Its premises are considered myths from the standpoint of Indigenous psychology.

To strip psychedelic use down to its chemicals is to de-radicalize its communal and anti-authoritarian roots. Given psychiatry’s history of treatment outcome failure and its ethically compromising financial relationships with Big Pharma, is it really a good idea to make psychiatry the societal authority in charge of psychedelic use?

From Reuters: Musk said his company Neuralink, which is one of over a dozen companies developing brain implants, will make the paralyzed walk, the blind see and eventually turn people into cyborgs.

Growing rates of long-term psychiatric drug prescriptions and documented issues with withdrawal demonstrate a need for safe deprescribing practices.

Poets with lived experience with mental distress are invited to perform their poetry live at MIA's Mad Poetry Slam on Zoom on May 7th, 12PM EST.

Dr. Emily G. McDonald of the Canadian Deprescribing Network gives a grand rounds presentation on polypharmacy, medication overload and deprescribing.

From The Washington Post: Under the Baker Act, kindergarteners can be forcibly committed to psych centers for exams. Advocates say the process is traumatic without being helpful.

It is the capacity of mad studies to advance the idea that mad is not necessarily bad. Acute Religious Experiences are always phenomenally mad, but not necessarily pathological.

Jay Schulkin, a neuroscientist and philosopher of prodigious curiosity and energy, has died at age 70 of hepatic cancer.

From CNN: Civil rights attorney Ben Crump said the video is a "commentary on how inhumane law enforcement officials treat people who are having a mental health crisis as criminals rather than treating them as people who are in need of help."

From AP: Family and attorneys say Irvo Otieno, 28, was subjected to brutal treatment at a local jail and then at the state hospital where he died during the admission process.

Psychosis pills were hailed as a great advance, but this was because they kept the patients docile and quiet, which was very popular with the staff in psychiatric wards.

Respondents described the grief and rage associated with being socially isolated while healing from childbirth and caring for a newborn, in some cases, entirely on their own.

Authors with lived experience of extreme states present a humanistic contrast to psychiatry.

Harrow's research over the years told of how long-term antipsychotic use is associated with worse outcomes, even after controlling for psychosis severity.

From NPR: Heumann was a major American civil rights hero who was working to spread knowledge of disability civil rights to the moment she died earlier this month at age 75.

This was no illness. And I knew my biochemistry was not the primary issue. I chose to call it a severe stress breakdown.

In this blog, Gøtzsche discusses the ways in which drug trials are biased, including breaking of the double-blind and industry manipulation.

From Thomas Pynchon: Atmospheric forces channel suddenly through the individual, the release point of a larger, pressured system. At the moment of crisis, all attention goes to the diode.

From Krishnamurti Foundation Trust: and Charles Eisenstein: It’s not because there is something wrong with you that you can’t make yourself get with the program. It’s that there is something wrong with the program.

Why does the U.S. describe perinatal screening as providing a proven benefit, while the task forces in the U.K. and Canada see no evidence of such benefit?

From The Stanford Daily: Colleagues say Marc Tessier-Lavigne tried to keep hidden the findings of an inquiry into his 2009 Nature paper that had made a splash in the Alzheimer's research world.

Since many psych patients become forced consumers, their advocates have a duty to be educated and concerned with adverse reactions.

My recent article was so threatening to the whole edifice of psychiatry that the peer reviewers and editors did what they could to kill it.

From Aeon: In order to understand and heal mental distress, we must see our minds as existing in relationships, not inside our heads.