MIA Today

From Uplift: Our attempts to control both ourselves and the world around us lead to a kind of slavery where we are both the slave and the slave master at the same time.

From the BBC: Humiliated, abused and isolated for weeks - patients are being harmed due to a 'toxic culture' at one of the UK's biggest mental health 'hospitals.'

Schools are rolling out programs and services intended to safeguard students’ emotional well-being. They are full of potential—and pitfalls.

From the Los Angeles Times: "From an Indigenous point of view everything is a teacher, a spirit, if you will. So we ask what the so-called depression or anxiety tells us and where is it coming from." ~ Jerry Tello

I offer the following 20 suggestions for advocates who want to get something done and not just vent their quite justifiable criticisms of the mental health system.

Questioning is what I did, but once I started questioning so much of what I had learned and of what my identity had been, it wasn’t obvious to me where I should stop.

From The New Republic: If you measure in terms of the power to coerce, surveil, and inflict lasting harm, social workers are, thanks to the nature of the job, cops by another name.

From WPSU Creative Services: What would happen if we could speak the truth about our pain, and hear the truth about other people's pain? What if we got better at grief?

Anyone detained and then formally committed under Wisconsin’s civil mental health laws can initially be held and forcibly drugged for six long months. Yet, for years, not a single person has been able to appeal the six-month commitments in court.

From Mother Jones: “The lived experience cannot be understated” as a key part of a successful crisis response team, says a San Francisco Department of Public Health representative.

From Newsweek: Evidence is mounting that doctors are vastly overprescribing SSRIs, and clinicians are calling for a new approach to depression that involves curtailing their use.

Homebirth was a reflection of how the mental health system should work: Informed person-centered care while respecting your agency.

Emotions function like a guidepost to what we need. But if we are not aware this, we cannot understand what they are trying to convey.

From The Washington Post: "If primary care providers are asked to screen for one more thing, we are going to break without more resources," said a nurse practitioner in Northern California.

From National Post: Many think too little serotonin causes depression and antidepressants can correct that imbalance. But psychiatrists stopped believing that theory long ago.

What do we lose when we view boredom and curiosity as "symptoms" of ADHD? It can rob us of intuitions that crucial life changes desperately need to be made.

From The New York Times: The pharmaceutical industry finances about 75 percent of the FDA's drug division through its "user fee" program, which essentially sees drug companies regulate themselves.

From Dr. Caroline Leaf: "The message I’d like to give to people," says Whitaker, "is that if we can actually have an honest paradigm, we can hope again, and we can find solutions again, and we can build better environments."

Unbiased experts must examine the claims and research of psychiatry and issue a report as to whether psychiatry not only has a valid medical basis, but whether this basis justifies the widespread violation of medical ethics and the routine use of imprisonment and torture.

From The Imprint: Youth and Family News: A new study indicates statewide reforms have freed thousands of abused and neglected children from the lasting effects of the most powerful psychiatric drugs, but concerns about other medications persist.

From Detroit Free Press: When mental health service recipients' rights are violated in Michigan, the system for redress has a built-in conflict that is hurting the most vulnerable.

Telling stories they know are or may be untrue has become standard practice in psychiatry. It is a small step to set aside the need to provide truly informed consent.

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.

From Slate: Normalizing discussion of suicide is the key idea behind Alternatives to Suicide (Alt2Su), peer-led groups intended for adults who have suicidal thoughts or identify as survivors.

We do not belong to the scientology movement, but this false accusation triggered an email correspondence that exposed the problematic happenings usually behind closed academic curtains.