MIA Today

A new study promotes the use of a standardized approach to antidepressant tapering.

The “genetics of mental disorders” story told in Kolker's "Hidden Valley Road" involves omission and misrepresentation of genetic research.

From The Guardian: A new draft quality standard from the UK's medical watchdog NICE includes specific guidance for GPs to help adults come off antidepressant medication permanently.

From The Washington Post: The changes, which come after former and current students sued the university, will allow students to keep their health insurance and take leaves of absence instead of being pushed to withdraw.

The discrepancy between opinion and science is prevalent in psychiatric textbooks. The coming generations of healthcare professionals will learn a lot during their studies that is incorrect.

Combining drugs and therapy also did not lead to better depression outcomes than therapy alone.

From Touch the Future: To blame guns, TV, video games, Twinkies, the bully next door, bad genes, and all the rest for the pervasive violence, self-mutilation, self-medication, and suicide is a misguided defense.

"Psychiatric practice is too often violating human rights, too often incapable of understanding the suffering of people, too often unable to provide help to people who need housing, work, money, respect, inclusion and instead are receiving psychotropic drugs, electroshock, physical restraint, isolation."

From Medicating Normal: Poet-activist Ann Bracken's new book explores mother-daughter depression, chronic pain experiences, and struggling in a mechanistic and reductionist health-care system.

From Wild Truth: Being in touch with reality means seeing things clearly, without the veils or filters known as defenses. Thus, we’re all crazy to some degree, to the degree that we have defenses.

Founder and Executive Director Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu talks about the organization's work to support struggling students and end discrimination against them.

From Sustainable Human: Everyone thinks that the way to get to love, happiness and joy is by avoiding the forest of dark emotions inside us. But we actually need to go through it in order to get to the Garden of Eden.

A psychiatrist obsessed with violence among the mentally ill, Torrey is dedicated to promoting involuntary hospitalization.

From ACES Too High/Kindred Media: A review of research by Dr. Allan Schore shows that early life experience influences boys significantly more than girls, leading them to need more care instead of less.

“You can’t coerce someone into wanting to be alive. Force just doesn’t work. People must be invited to live while supporters (healthcare professionals, social workers, loved ones) make their lives and world more habitable.”

From Harvard Divinity Bulletin: The therapeutic instrumentalization of transcendence ignores volumes of wisdom from traditions that emphasize the dangers of nonordinary experience.

From The Guardian: Although the overall percentage who were prescribed antipsychotics was relatively small, experts consider it a worrying trend since these powerful drugs carry serious safety risks.

Leading figures in psychiatry acknowledge that DSM psychiatric diagnoses and the chemical imbalance theory of mental illness are not scientifically valid, but are useful fictions that help people manage their emotions and comply with their medication treatments.

Dr. Sterling's grand rounds lecture looks at why U.S. deaths of despair are the highest in the developed world, what our species' needs are for a healthy lifecycle, and what happens when those needs are frustrated.

We interview Ole Andreas Underland, Director of the Hurdalsjøen Recovery Center in Norway which provides “medication-free” care for those who want such treatment or who want to taper from their psychiatric drugs. Ole Andreas explains why the success of this pioneering approach might threaten its future.

From The Washington Post: An inspector general report indicates nursing home physicians have traded one controversial practice for another: sedating dementia patients with anticonvulsant drugs rather than antipsychotics.

Leading ADHD researchers outline four mistakes that turned ADHD from a description of behavior into a medical disease.

From Sustainable Human: Western medicine has a number of hidden ideological beliefs that hinder our understanding and resolution of illnesses, whether physical or mental.

From Academy of Ideas: "In 1931, when Brave New World was being written, I was convinced that there was still plenty of time," wrote Huxley. "Twenty-seven years later…I feel a good deal less optimistic…The nightmare of total organization…is now awaiting us, just around the next corner."

As uses of psychiatric force expand, can social media be better used to focus critical attention?