MIA Today

Headlines of Today's Posts

Vector illustration. Head shape with broken prison bars; a man in a suit launches out on a jetpack into a blue sky with clouds.

Madness and Method: Exploring the Realm of Unconventional Reasoning

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What if madness isn’t a defective form of reasoning, but a distinctive style of reasoning?

Personal Boundaries and Their Violations

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From Dr. Gary Sharpe/Out-Thinking Parkinson's: How invasions of physical, mental, emotional, and energetic space damage boundaries and lead to psychological and physical health conditions.

Medication-free Ward in Tromsø, Norway May Soon Close

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The Tromsø ward has shown that offering patients the option to forgo psychiatric medication, or to taper from the drugs, can be a successful model of care.

How Literature Teaches Compassion Over Condescension

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From Psychology Today: Great works of literature remind us of the humanity of others by allowing us to imagine our way into their woundedness and hear their stories from within.

Most People Who’ve Used the 988 Crisis Line Say They Wouldn’t Turn to It...

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From CNN: New research in JAMA Network Open found only a quarter of users said they'd be very likely turn to 988 in the future for themselves or a loved one.
Blue background, white pill bottle, blue and white pills out of the top

Antidepressant Withdrawal: A Clinician’s Middle View

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In the debate about antidepressant withdrawal, I present a middle ground, where the views of both sides are understood to have origins in wanting to help people.

The Superpowers of Sensitive People

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From Greater Good Magazine: Sensitivity is the ability to "perceive, process, and respond deeply to one’s environment" and is exactly what our world desperately needs, argue the authors of a new book.
3D illustration of an upside-down maze with business-people falling out of it into a white void

Critical Psychiatry Textbook, Chapter 16: Is There Any Future for Psychiatry? (Part Four)

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On the failures of the publicly funded long-term studies and psychiatry’s fraudulent reporting of these results.
Pregnant woman visiting young psychologist

Animal Study Shows Impact of Prozac in Pregnancy on the Child

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Researchers found that rats born to mothers given the antidepressant Prozac during pregnancy or breastfeeding exhibited varied behavioral and developmental effects, with implications for the understanding of antidepressant impacts during human pregnancies.
A girl looks sad, blurry through a rainy pane of glass, dark

The War on Suicide Is Making Things Worse

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While allegedly intended to help, institutionalizing people against their will does more harm than good. Psychiatric coercion is dehumanizing.

Inside the Psychiatric Hospitals Where Foster Kids Are a “Gold Mine”

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From Mother Jones: Scandal-plagued health care giant Universal Health Services (UHS) profits handsomely off the failing American child welfare system.

It’s Time to Consign the “Selfish Gene” to the History Books | Jeremy Lent

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From Salon: The trouble with the 'selfish gene' story is not just that it is scientifically flawed; it's also that it presents such an impoverished view of life's dazzling magnificence.

May Cause Side Effects–Radical Acceptance and Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal: An Interview with Brooke Siem

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Brooke Siem discusses her experiences of being medicated with antidepressants as a teenager, her withdrawal from a cocktail of psychiatric drugs and her debut memoir, May Cause Side Effects.
Painting of Dostoevsky by Vasily Perov

Dostoevsky: A Psychologist We Can All Learn From

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Psychology has greatly broadened its scope since Nietzsche’s day and yet his implied criticism is one the discipline is still wrestling with.
Stock photo of a white-coat male doctor holding a screwdriver to the head of a male patient as if to "fix" him.

Critical Psychiatry Textbook, Chapter 16: Is There Any Future for Psychiatry? (Part Three)

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Psychiatry forcefully maintains its delusions, even when the most reliable science has shown that their beliefs are wrong.

The Troubled-Teen Industry Offers Trauma, Not Therapy

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From The New York Times: Hundreds of thousands of young Americans have endured harms or assaults in residential boot camps, wilderness therapy and Christian and therapeutic boarding schools.
A girl wearing virtual reality device over eyes looks startled with hands wide and mouth open

Why Failed Psychiatry Lives On: Its Industrial Complex, Politics, & Technology Worship

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By embracing the widely popular technology-worship “religion,” psychiatry is permitted to ignore the reality that its repeated failures are evidence that its fundamental paradigm is misguided.

Psychiatric Patients Restrained at Sky-High Rates at This L.A. Hospital

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From the L.A. Times: L.A. General’s Hawkins Mental Health Center has reported a restraint rate more than 50 times higher than the national average for inpatient psychiatric facilities.

Grant, Interrupted: An Introduction and Report Back from Oregon

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We hope the Oregon Health Authority can overcome its critics and get back on track to doing what it set out to do: creating peer support respites led by grassroots groups.

People Not Professionals

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From Aeon: Peer support provides a cathartic space for refuge that transcends the constraints of expert-delivered formal services in favor of a more equitable relationship.

Branding Diseases—How Drug Companies Market Psychiatric Conditions: An Interview with Ray Moynihan

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MIA’s Ayurdhi Dhar interviews Ray Moynihan about the marketing of disorders, broadening of diagnoses, and harmful treatments.

Reality According to Whom? Listening to My Wife—and The Problems with ‘Psychosis’

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Sam Ruck shares an excerpt from his book "Healing Companions," which describes his life with, and love for, his wife and her “alters.” 

In the Name of ‘Modernization,’ Newsom Admin. Wants to Disappear Unhoused and Disabled People...

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From Disability Visibility Project: The CARE Act is predicated on a big lie perpetrated by policymakers and marketed to the public: that houselessness is caused by ‘severe and untreated’ mental illness and substance use.
A finger flicks a wooden meeple out of a row of them

Critical Psychiatry Textbook, Chapter 16: Is There Any Future for Psychiatry? (Part Two)

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Peter Gøtzsche discusses how critics of psychiatry are silenced in top medical journals and in the media.

Neuroscientist Argues the Left Side of Our Brains Have Taken Over Our Minds

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From CBC: "A way of thinking which is reductive, mechanistic has taken us over," says Iain McGilchrist. "We behave like people who have right hemisphere damage."