MIA Today

What can science tell us about music’s impact on our cognition and on our mood, on our capacity for empathy, and our sense of connection with others? How does it change the brain? How does it change us?

The day was one long meditation—doing what the mind ordered with no effort to control it. This is the Zen state that monks seek but that physicians consider a mental disorder to be treated by amphetamines.

Dr. Pies claims that the "chemical imbalance" theory was never really professed by psychiatrists. Yet he himself wrote an essay in "Creative Nonfiction" in 1999 that purveyed it directly to the layperson.

From Medium: For many of us, therapy is just another room where we are stared at and made to feel defective—and that’s if we can afford to go at all.

Within the current mental health paradigm, profound grief is often shoved into the universal category of depression and treated as a malfunction according to the biomedical model.

From Sky News: Dr. Ed White discusses his recent report about the lack of medical support for people coming off antidepressants and the online support groups forming in their absence.

David Straub describes his 4Sight Behavioral Model and CORE system for helping people work with their past and emotions.

Sami Timimi provides a discussion of the ways medication may be helpful for some, and advice and information on discontinuing psychiatric drugs.

A new study looks at how online communities provide information and support for patients experiencing psychiatric drug withdrawal.

The psychiatric cult uses its conspiracy theory of the cause of human suffering to let society off the hook while it enforces society’s oppression.

What I was able to learn about the injury inflicted by TMS and the culture surrounding it is an incredible insight into the treatment itself and the nature of the medical model in its current form.

From Psychology Is: Millions of people are prescribed psychiatric drugs each year, but few understand how these drugs actually affect the brain.

Madness Network News, founded in 1972 by two women inmates of Agnews State Hospital, was an anti-psychiatry journal that served as the focal point for organizing throughout North America, and even overseas.

From The Guardian: Mental health advocates have described the proposed reforms as an important step forward to treating people with respect and dignity.

The disease theory of addiction had been ingrained in our culture for 200 years when Nixon signed this law. But had we ever actually checked to see if it was all true?

NISAPI helps people achieve recovery by pairing the normalcy of a ranch and the nurturance of horses with a philosophy of postmodern collaborative practice.

If there was ever a time to re-evaluate how society deals with human suffering, it is now. The pandemic’s mental health effects strain every false narrative and misguided practice of psychiatry.

The notion that one can help a despondent person by giving him or her mood-altering drugs, while systematically ignoring the reason for his/her despondency is a travesty of a helping profession.

When we have a strong urge to live, it must be very difficult to understand another person’s wish to die. So far, no one has been willing or able to “go there” with me.

Deconstructing diagnosis, the nature of psychological injury, and how identifying a problem can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Prescribers are taught to prescribe psychiatric medication, but they are often not well-educated about the effects on patients of discontinuing these medications.

The mental health field's focus on the biomedical paradigm is like looking for your keys in only one spot, just because it's the most well-lit.

The mental health treatment I received between 2016-2019 was like an unreliable car that various mechanics had tinkered with. Yet each time I careened into a ditch, nobody looked at the car, just at me.

MIA's Tim Beck interviews critical psychologist Thomas Teo on how theory and research can do justice to the people it means to describe and explain.

From lonerwolf: There are two main types of spiritual emergency: mystical psychosis (hallucinations, mania, etc.) and the dark night of the soul (depression).