MIA Today

Nothing matters more than cultivating the most loving bond possible with those we love. How can stoicism help?

Peter Simons covers a clinical trial that found lithium ineffective at preventing suicide attempts, an essay by Allen Frances on the overdiagnosis of depression and overprescription of antidepressants, a review of the ineffectiveness and dangers of antidepressants, and an analysis that revealed that esketamine failed five of its six clinical trials.

Peter Gøtzsche discusses the results of the MTA study on ADHD drugs and the misleading statements textbooks make about ADHD treatment.

Megan Wildhood discusses the flaws in phrases like "fake it till you make it," "you can choose how you feel," and "no one is responsible for your life but you."

Therapists who encounter climate distress should reject the false burden borne by individuals and embrace a spirit of shared vulnerability, solidarity, collective action, and demands for justice.

There are quite a few books published about the lack of benefit and harm caused by so-called "antidepressants." Prescription for Sorrow, by Patrick Hahn, is simply the best one I have read.

In the first installment of MIA's Unheard Voices series, Carlton Brown talks about his life, living on the streets, the psychiatric system, and survival.

A Facebook page has been set up to tell of what it is like in the Illinois mental hospital where Marci Webber is being held after staff fought her conditional release because she refuses to take any more psych drugs.

David Edward Walker is the author of Coyote’s Swing: A Memoir and Critique of Mental Hygiene in Native America, which was published in February...

A powerful, heartbreaking wake-up call about how the severely damaging effects of medications that claim to relieve suffering can threaten generations in a family.

From Joanna Moncrieff: So maybe thinking about depression as a brain disease is the wrong way to think about it. Maybe we need a different sort of framework.

Here are methods for reducing or eliminating a child's psychiatric medications that I have seen work well over years of supporting families through this process.

From the Disability Visibility Project: Those of us who have survived psychiatric incarceration know that not only did the asylum never die — it is, and always was, another prison.

In this chapter, Peter Gøtzsche discusses the problems with observational studies and other flaws in ADHD research.

From Highly Sensitive Refuge: Highly sensitive people have important perspectives to contribute to society. They must protect their process, especially when the world doesn’t.

From The Washington Post: Suicidal students are pressured to withdraw from Yale, then have to apply to get back into the university.

Researchers have found further evidence that the anticholinergic effect of psychiatric drugs can lead to cognitive impairments.

The one core ingredient on which any recovery from emotional distress depends is the one that never makes an appearance in any medical handbook or psychiatric diagnostic manual—that is, love.

On the latest fad, ketamine, and how depression pills cause dependence and withdrawal.

Discussing a meta-analysis on the effectiveness of peer support: The co-opting of peer support specialists into roles that don’t fit with their purpose is a big problem.

A survey of 233,087 “internet users” in 34 countries that measured “mental wellbeing” found that the percentage of respondents who were “distressed or struggling” was highest in English-speaking regions of the world, where 30% fell into this category.

I have been involved in hundreds of commitment hearings in which psychiatric diagnoses were crucial. In that context, I have never witnessed the presence of all three factors: (1) the transparent (honest) use of diagnostic labels (which includes the acknowledgment of the inherent biases built into the labels as well as their limited validity), (2) allowing full voice to and full acknowledgment of the labeled person’s view of reality, and (3) using the labels in a manner that produced a useful understanding, which in standard mental health practice would require that the understanding be significantly more beneficial to the labeled person rather than the labeler.

A new article in Lancet Psychiatry debunks past studies claiming that those on low doses of antipsychotics are more likely to relapse.

Ivory McCuen needed warmth and a home the night she died. Court-ordered psychiatric drugs deliver neither warmth nor a home. Federal agencies need to consider people with lived experience.

Who is really more ill? A person who responds in a natural way to trauma? Or the indifferent society that locates so-called ‘disorders’ within the people that it harms, rather than itself?