MIA Today

Justin Karter discusses his journey to Mad in America, competing models of mental health, and how we navigate these stories in psychotherapy.

From the Daily Mail: Experts said the new recommendations could spur a surge in the use of anti-anxiety medications, which, some fear, are already at the center of a budding addiction crisis in the US.

"How to Grieve" is a Renaissance recreation of a lost text from ancient Rome by Cicero, and it’s meant for a wide audience. It's packed with talk-therapy strategies for coping with grief.

From The New York Times: Future generations will look back on the tactics used in the troubled teen industry and ask: How did we allow these practices to pass off as mental health treatment for so long?

The UK's drug regulator rejected Janssen's esketamine nasal spray. Why did the US FDA approve it?

Born and raised in suburban Weathersfield, Connecticut, Jim Flannery was committed at four mental hospitals across the United States. There he received the best care available in the modern world…torture.

From the Washington Examiner: I learned the hard way that doctors can be remarkably casual about things patients can’t afford to be when it comes to putting people on, and taking them off, antidepressants.

From Pulte Institute for Global Development: "We treat despair, addiction, obesity, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease at the molecular level with all these drugs sold by all these big pharma companies," says neuroscientist Peter Sterling, but "it's not bringing us health."

Psychiatry's defenders are open to criticism of psychiatry as long as it stops short of acknowledging the increasingly well-documented reality that psychiatry lacks any scientific merit.

From The Independent: "I would never take [benzodiazepines] again," said Fiona French, who took them for several decades. "Any drug that can cause that degree of intolerable suffering is a bad drug."

When looking at your own weak spots as a therapist, it would be a safe bet to first consider how you can improve your skills in developing a stronger alliance.

A study finds that commonly prescribed antidepressants are associated with the development of diabetes, hypertension, and other diseases.

From The Daily Mail: Patients on antidepressants are not being warned of the risk that the pills could permanently ruin their sex lives, experts say.

From Fox News: "You can’t just carve the world into 'disorders' and think you’re doing an adequate job of determining someone’s mental health needs," said UCSF professor Dr. Jonathan Shedler.

We still try to shove every kind of emotion into a neatly organized box, give it a label, maybe even an accompanying medicine to make it neat and predictable.

Babies born to mothers taking antidepressants during pregnancy were more than six times as likely to have neonatal withdrawal syndrome—including breathing problems, irritability/agitation, tremors, feeding problems, and seizures—than those born to mothers taking other types of drugs.

From The Joe Rogan Experience: "The so-called experts say that ADHD is 'the most heritable mental illness there is,'" says renowned physician Gabor Maté. "But I say, it's neither an illness, nor is it heritable."

From Uplift: Our attempts to control both ourselves and the world around us lead to a kind of slavery, where we are both the slave and the slavemaster at the same time.

From the BBC: Humiliated, abused and isolated for weeks - patients are being harmed due to a 'toxic culture' at one of the UK's biggest mental health 'hospitals.'

Schools are rolling out programs and services intended to safeguard students’ emotional well-being. They are full of potential—and pitfalls.

From the Los Angeles Times: "From an Indigenous point of view, everything is a teacher, a spirit, if you will. So we ask what the so-called depression or anxiety tells us and where is it coming from." ~ Jerry Tello

I offer the following 20 suggestions for advocates who want to get something done and not just vent their quite justifiable criticisms of the mental health system.

Questioning is what I did, but once I started questioning so much of what I had learned and of what my identity had been, it wasn’t obvious to me where I should stop.

From The New Republic: If you measure in terms of the power to coerce, surveil, and inflict lasting harm, social workers are, thanks to the nature of the job, cops by another name.

From WPSU Creative Services: What would happen if we could speak the truth about our pain, and hear the truth about other people's pain? What if we got better at grief?