Beliefs that Create Madness
We know that it is not simply a chemical imbalance or a broken brain. We know how the context plays a large role.
Antidepressants in PregnancyâTurning a Blind Eye, Again
You might think that telling women about the potential risks of taking antidepressants during pregnancy would be uncontroversial.
Sober Living: Why Less Clinical Sometimes Means More Recovery
Real independence is where most people stumble. Treatment canât replicate what itâs like to live sober in the chaos of everyday life.
The Psychological Totalization of Experience: Objectification and Subjectivity
I must be a mechanistic, predictable unit, in order for a psychiatric label or a psychological variable to be implemented on me smoothly.
ECT: New Studies Detail Harms, Lack of Efficacy, Lack of Informed Consent
What people who have received ECT really think about what they were told, and about how ECT affected them.
Narrative Reclamation: Who’s Allowed to Tell Their Story?
Narratives have the power to lock us upâsometimes literally. But they also have the power to set us free.
How to be a Critical Psychologist Without Losing Your Soul: A Conversation With Zenobia...
On the Mad in America podcast, Zenobia Morrill, JosĂŠ Giovanni Luiggi-HernĂĄndez and Justin Karter join us to explore the need to raise awareness of psychological approaches that challenge mainstream perspectives.
Reflections on My Mistrust for Other Mental Health Workers
I learned to hold my tongue around mental health workers. I dealt with their slurs by working harder and longer than them.
Confessions of an Ad Writer: How I Helped Turn Atypical Antipsychotics into a Billion-Dollar...
How we redefined schizophrenia, rewrote the safety narrative of antipsychotics, and helped drive one of the most successful (and concerning) pharmaceutical launches in history.
Two Voices and One Chair
Itâs a war between two voices. The writerâs voice shapes, composes, imagines. The traumaâs voice: raw, insistent, unfiltered, breaking in.
AntipsychoticsâAnd How Iâve Learned to Manage the Side Effects
While suppressing pathological symptoms, drugs also suppress the normal instinct of "wanting to move" and "wanting to enjoy life".
It’s the Cracked Ones Who Let the Light in
The identified patient is often the healthiest: a lighthouse desperately pointing the way to the wounds and power imbalances in the family.
The Deceptive Politics of Civil Commitment in Oregon
A workgroup in Oregon unanimously recommended rights-based mental health care. Then the politicians and those invested in forced treatment splintered off and implemented the exact opposite.
Treat Systems, Not Symptoms: Defending the Sanity of the Oppressed
Pathologizing distress benefits psychiatry, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies, but dampens responses that could dismantle oppression.
Is Dialogue the Best Medicine? A Conversation With Jaakko Seikkula
Jaakko Seikkula joins us on the MIA podcast to discuss how Open Dialogue came to be, the research that shows its positive outcomes, how psychiatry has failed to learn from Open Dialogue practice and more.
Cochrane Recommends Antidepressants for Anxiety in a Garbage In, Garbage Out Review
Cochrane's review of antidepressants for anxiety is misleading and harmful.
Out of Sight, Out of Mind
Societyâs practice of physically segregating privileged people from those they deem to be âless thanâ has deep roots beginning with the treatment of madness.
America is Legislating a Return to the Asylum, One Policy at a Time
Federal and state policymakers across the partisan divide are defunding vital programs and rolling back policies and rights protections.
Where Did All the People Go?
The question that this history will try to answer is how Oregonian lives were affected by deinstitutionalization, in three phases.
An Approach to Making Sense of Psychiatric Research
I donât consider myself a scientist in the usual sense, but I know a lot about what makes scientific findings more valid and useful.
Subpatterns: A Deeper Dive into Attachment Theory
Psychological issues have their roots in childhood and are linked to the attachment patterns we develop early in life.
Grossly Flawed Paper Denies that Antidepressant Withdrawal Effects are âClinically Meaningfulâ
Pharma-funded researchers are endangering patient safety by minimising the incidence and severity of withdrawal.
Brain Disorders or Problems with Living? How Research on âMental Illnessâ Went Awry
Is it time to consider the possibility that the entire field is a failed enterprise, a wrong turn in human history?
Becoming Stewards of Shadow: Beyond Great Men and Myths of Invention
Before the psyche was carved into parts with elegant diagrams and marketed methods, cultures walked with shadow.Â
The Degrees on the Wall
The therapists who helped me most werenât the ones who dazzled with their knowledge. They were the ones who made me feel less alone.