MIA Today

Headlines of Today's Posts

VIENNA, AUSTRIA - Feb 09: Vienna Opera Ball is an annual Austrian society event which takes place in the building of the Vienna State Opera in Vienna

Beliefs that Create Madness

1
We know that it is not simply a chemical imbalance or a broken brain. We know how the context plays a large role.
Pregnant person consulting a doctor

Antidepressants in Pregnancy—Turning a Blind Eye, Again

4
You might think that telling women about the potential risks of taking antidepressants during pregnancy would be uncontroversial.
Shot of a young man comforting his peer on the steps

Sober Living: Why Less Clinical Sometimes Means More Recovery

7
Real independence is where most people stumble. Treatment can’t replicate what it’s like to live sober in the chaos of everyday life.
Collage of a complex person reduced to wooden blocks and post it notes of happy and sad faces

The Psychological Totalization of Experience: Objectification and Subjectivity

8
I must be a mechanistic, predictable unit, in order for a psychiatric label or a psychological variable to be implemented on me smoothly.
An elderly woman in a wheelchair tells a doctor (out of focus) about her symptoms

ECT: New Studies Detail Harms, Lack of Efficacy, Lack of Informed Consent

21
What people who have received ECT really think about what they were told, and about how ECT affected them.
BW photo. Man in a suit telling children

Narrative Reclamation: Who’s Allowed to Tell Their Story?

19
Narratives have the power to lock us up—sometimes 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...

4
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.
Unhappy man and group of people behind his back indoors. Therapy session

Reflections on My Mistrust for Other Mental Health Workers

17
I learned to hold my tongue around mental health workers. I dealt with their slurs by working harder and longer than them.
A hand puts lipstick and a face on a risperidone bottle

Confessions of an Ad Writer: How I Helped Turn Atypical Antipsychotics into a Billion-Dollar...

112
How we redefined schizophrenia, rewrote the safety narrative of antipsychotics, and helped drive one of the most successful (and concerning) pharmaceutical launches in history.
A writer and a military veteran: two versions of the same man sit on a chair

Two Voices and One Chair

14
It’s a war between two voices. The writer’s voice shapes, composes, imagines. The trauma’s voice: raw, insistent, unfiltered, breaking in.
Paper head with brain and pills on red background

Antipsychotics—And How I’ve Learned to Manage the Side Effects

16
While suppressing pathological symptoms, drugs also suppress the normal instinct of "wanting to move" and "wanting to enjoy life".
Close-up of a person covered in white paint with gold cracks, kintsugi style

It’s the Cracked Ones Who Let the Light in

4
The identified patient is often the healthiest: a lighthouse desperately pointing the way to the wounds and power imbalances in the family.
A magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat labeled "Forced Treatment"

The Deceptive Politics of Civil Commitment in Oregon

9
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.
A person is in the spotlight. A wooden figure of a man. People lie around.

Treat Systems, Not Symptoms: Defending the Sanity of the Oppressed

13
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

21
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.
Crumpled papers in a trashcan

Cochrane Recommends Antidepressants for Anxiety in a Garbage In, Garbage Out Review

14
Cochrane's review of antidepressants for anxiety is misleading and harmful.
Enraged crowd of people are behind bars. Fence wire mesh barbed wire, vector silhouette. Street camera on the pillar. Sunset background.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

43
Society’s practice of physically segregating privileged people from those they deem to be “less than” has deep roots beginning with the treatment of madness.
Simple single family house with words "Peer Respite " over the front door, with a sign hanging from the doorknob saying "Closed."

America is Legislating a Return to the Asylum, One Policy at a Time

85
Federal and state policymakers across the partisan divide are defunding vital programs and rolling back policies and rights protections.
Miniature shot. People crowded in the lower right corner, walking

Where Did All the People Go?

4
The question that this history will try to answer is how Oregonian lives were affected by deinstitutionalization, in three phases.
A magnifying glass and pen on charts and data

An Approach to Making Sense of Psychiatric Research

141
I don’t 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

4
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 “Clinically Meaningful”

19
Pharma-funded researchers are endangering patient safety by minimising the incidence and severity of withdrawal.
Doctor explaining something to patient

Brain Disorders or Problems with Living? How Research on “Mental Illness” Went Awry

25
Is it time to consider the possibility that the entire field is a failed enterprise, a wrong turn in human history?
A glow through the trees of a dark forest

Becoming Stewards of Shadow: Beyond Great Men and Myths of Invention

6
Before the psyche was carved into parts with elegant diagrams and marketed methods, cultures walked with shadow. 

The Degrees on the Wall

35
The therapists who helped me most weren’t the ones who dazzled with their knowledge. They were the ones who made me feel less alone.