Two Voices and One Chair
It’s a war between two voices. The writer’s voice shapes, composes, imagines. The trauma’s voice: raw, insistent, unfiltered, breaking in.
Antipsychotics—And How I’ve 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
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.
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.
FDA’s Artificial Intelligence is Supposed to Revolutionize Drug Approvals. It’s Making up Studies
From CNN. "To hear health officials in the Trump administration talk, artificial intelligence has arrived in Washington to fast-track new life-saving drugs to market,...
FDA Expert Panel on Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) and Pregnancy
An FDA expert roundtable on Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) and pregnancy to facilitate discussions on the safety of the developing child. Held on...
An Approach to Making Sense of Psychiatric Research
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
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”
Pharma-funded researchers are endangering patient safety by minimising the incidence and severity of withdrawal.
Brain Disorders or Problems with Living? How Research on “Mental Illness” Went Awry
Is it time to consider the possibility that the entire field is a failed enterprise, a wrong turn in human history?
Pills, Profits & the Untold Story: A Conversation With Robert Whitaker
Katinka Newman interviews Robert Whitaker for the Med Free Mental Fitness podcast.
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.
The Degrees on the Wall
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.
Court-ordered Treatment for Serious Mental Illness is ‘Inconclusive,’ Says Federal Report
From STAT (paid subscription required): "In the last decade, the federal government has provided $146 million to organizations that provide outpatient care to people...
Mad in Puerto Rico
Since Puerto Rico is, in essence, a colony of the United States, colonialism has a heavy impact on mental health and the healthcare system.
Response Rates in Psychiatric Drug Trials are Statistical Hocus Pocus
Peter Gøtzsche writes for the Brownstone Institute: "The outcomes used in psychiatric drug trials are not meaningful, and psychiatric diagnoses and names of drug...
Psychiatry Criticism Politics: When the Enemy of Your Enemy Is Not Your Friend
Those who would like to abolish psychiatry in order to replace it with their own coercive, authoritarian policies are not friends.
The Cat Is Out of the Bag
I’ve healed; not overnight and not without effort, but today I feel the vitality that I had before my psychiatrization began as a teen.
A Mad Perspective on IFS Training
I became concerned that the reason I was unable to hear from my parts was because I take antipsychotic medication.
