The Importance of Recovering Our Feeling Nature | Pete Walker, MFT
From The Tao of Fully Feeling: Individuals who choose or are coerced into only identifying with "positive" feelings often wind up in an emotionally lifeless middle ground – bland, deadened, and dissociated in an unemotional "no-man's-land."
A New Paradigm for Testing Psychiatric Drugs Is Needed
This paper reviews the problems with the usual double-blind, placebo-controlled trials on which drug approvals are based, and advocates for a stricter form of testing psychiatric drugs with patient-relevant outcomes, real comparators, long-term outcomes, and assessment of harms.
Defining What It Means to Care | Leah Harris
From The Progressive Magazine: We want to think of mental health facilities as safe, compassionate places to get help in a crisis. But unless you’ve been a patient in one of these places, it can be difficult to grasp just how carceral and punitive they often are.
One Flew Over the Scientific Consensus’ Nest—The Story of Dr. Ophir and ADHD
The backlash against Dr. Yaakov Ophir, licensed clinical psychologist and promising scholar, began when he reported his findings about the scientific validity of ADHD.
Medication Overload: More Older Adults Than Ever Are Taking Multiple Drugs
From Next Avenue: More than 40% of older Americans take five or more prescription drugs, a phenomenon known as polypharmacy, entailing a 200% increase over the past 20 years.
Chemicals Have Consequences—Antidepressants and Pregnancy: An Interview With Adam Urato, MD
Adam joins us to discuss what we do and don’t know about the effects of antidepressants on babies and mothers and the importance of counselling in order to aid families in making important decisions about pharmaceutical drug use.
Investigation Spotlights Rise of For-Profit Ethics Boards in Research
From The Washington Post: An emphasis on speed and profit may be leading some institutional research boards to be less focused on potential harms to human subjects, a watchdog report has found.
Beyond Labels and Meds—Closer Look: Aurora Ramos
Meet another talented teen behind the pieces in MIA's art exhibition, who says: "I think art is underrated sometimes because of its seemingly uselessness, but I highly believe it can cure many minds."
Some Moms Are Microdosing Mushrooms for Anxiety and Depression
From The Washington Post: “There is no magic pill or plant that allows you to bypass the healing of childhood trauma," says therapist Brooke Novick. But "this sacred medicine, when used with intention, respect and care, can powerfully support us on our paths of healing and evolution.”
Critical Psychiatry Textbook, Chapter 4: Are Psychiatric Disorders Caused by a Chemical Imbalance? ...
On the evidence base for textbooks' statements of the imbalance of neurotransmitters causing psychiatric disorders.
‘Descartes’ Error’: Why Facts and Feelings Are Inseparable
From Medium/Farid Alsabeh: Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio argues that the link between intellect and affect is much more substantial than we normally think.
Black Movement Leaders: Lost & Found
As some of us get caught up in lamenting the whiteness of our movement, we are actively losing the stories of Black leaders.
Medical Personnel Often Ignore Mental Health Patients’ Advance Directives
From NC Health News: "The advance directive clearly had medicine that he was allergic to listed on there, and they just disregarded it," said one mother. "So once they did that, he spiraled downward quick."
We’re Obsessed with Labelling Suffering, But Our Power to Think about it Matters More
I needed Kierkegaard and Freud; my psychiatrist prescribed cereal bars. My despair was an imbalance to be corrected, rather than a relationship with the world.
Data Brokers Are Now Selling Your Mental Health Status
From The Washington Post: For years, data brokers have operated in a controversial corner of the internet economy, but the pandemic-era rise of telehealth and therapy apps has fueled a more contentious product line than usual: Americans’ mental health data.
Obituary of Fred Baughman, Pediatric Neurologist and Prominent Critic of ADHD
Dr. Baughman was the author of the 2006 book The ADHD Fraud: How Psychiatry Makes Patients Out of Normal Children.
Beyond Labels and Meds—Closer Look: HoJin Kwak
This is the first of 4 spotlight interviews with some of the talented youth behind the pieces in MIA's art exhibition. HoJin states: "The original idea for my drawing started with the brain. The complexity of its sudden twists and curves fascinates me."
From Nazi Blitzkriegs to ADHD Treatment: What Stimulant Drugs Can and Cannot Do
From CounterPunch: When humans are forced to be cogs in a machine—be it a war machine, a workplace machine, or a school machine—we need to become more machinelike, which can be expedited by some psychostimulant drugs.
Remembering Fernando Freitas in Brazil
Psychiatrist Paulo Amarante writes of Fernando Freitas and his fight against psychiatry's pathologization of life.
Critical Psychiatry Textbook, Chapter 3: Are Psychiatric Disorders Detectable in a Brain Scan?
Peter Gøtzsche discusses how textbooks portray brain imaging data for psychiatric diagnoses and the flaws with that body of research.
The Childhood Origins of Narcissism
From Vital Mind Coaching: The core childhood origin/genesis of the ‘narcissistic personality' occurs when a child is used by the parent(s) to meet the parent(s)' own needs.
Is It Delusional Paranoia or Heightened Awareness?
From Medium/Rev. Sheri Heller, LCSW: If we are to glean anything from our persecutory fears, let it be that we glean the benefits of distrusting that which should not be trusted.
Summer Mad Camp 2023
Mad Camp, as a work in progress, is a five-day summer camp for mad people, July 20-24, at a forested retreat center in Northern California.
MAD CAMP July 20-24, 2023 | Seeking Volunteers & Donations | Tickets by March...
From Mad Camp/Madness Radio: Will Hall, Dina Tyler, Monica Cassani and the Mad Camp crew invite planet Earth’s survivors/evaders/transformers of psychiatry to a 5-day summer camp in Northern California.
Teen Arts Exhibition: Beyond Labels And Meds: What It Feels Like To Be Me
28 teen artists share the power of their creativity in this collection of profoundly moving, courageous, and beautiful artwork.
