Allies for Human Rights in Mental Health: Psychiatric Survivor David W. Oaks Interviews WHO...
"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."
A Conversation With Ann Bracken, Author of ‘Crash: A Memoir of Overmedication and Recovery’
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.
The Dividing Line Between Crazy and Not Crazy | Daniel Mackler
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.
Project LETS: Building Peer-Led Mental Health Alternatives on Campus
Founder and Executive Director Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu talks about the organization's work to support struggling students and end discrimination against them.
Why Breakdowns Are Sometimes Necessary
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.
New York’s Mayor: We’re out of Ideas, so It’s “Back to the Cuckoo’s Nest”...
A psychiatrist obsessed with violence among the mentally ill, Torrey is dedicated to promoting involuntary hospitalization.
Be Worried About Boys, Especially Baby Boys | Darcia Narvaez, PhD
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”: The Carceral Heart of the...
“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.”
A Theological Reckoning With ‘Bad Trips’
From Harvard Divinity Bulletin: The therapeutic instrumentalization of transcendence ignores volumes of wisdom from traditions that emphasize the dangers of nonordinary experience.
Concern as Proportion of Children in England on Antipsychotics Doubles
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 Psychiatrists Unwittingly Acknowledge Psychiatry Is a Religion, Not a Science
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.
A Neuroscientist Views Deaths of Despair and Depression
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.
A Revolution Wobbles: Will Norway’s “Medication-Free” Hospital Survive?
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.
Epilepsy Drugs as ‘Chemical Restraint’ on Rise in Nursing Homes
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.
The Faulty Reasoning That Turned ADHD Into a Disease
Leading ADHD researchers outline four mistakes that turned ADHD from a description of behavior into a medical disease.
The Biases of Western Medicine | Gabor Maté, MD
From Sustainable Human: Western medicine has a number of hidden ideological beliefs that hinder our understanding and resolution of illnesses, whether physical or mental.
Do We Live in a Brave New World? Aldous Huxley’s Warning to the World
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."
Why Isn’t There a Popular Hashtag for Involuntary Commitment?
As uses of psychiatric force expand, can social media be better used to focus critical attention?
Misleading Ads Fueled Rapid Growth of Online Mental Health Companies
From The Wall Street Journal: In the two years since the government expanded the scope of allowable telehealth services, companies have been operating largely outside of the advertising rules that govern drugmakers.
Seriously Misleading Network Meta-analysis in Lancet of Acceptability of Depression Pills
It is a futile exercise to rank depression pills based on flawed trial reports and—most importantly—when the patients prefer to be treated with a placebo.
Congressional Inquiry into Alzheimer’s Drug Faults Its Maker and FDA
From The New York Times: The agency’s actions "raise serious concerns about FDA’s lapses in protocol," the report concluded. Nevertheless, the FDA is now evaluating two other Alzheimer’s drugs for approval early next year.
The New York Times Uncritically Repeats Discredited Antidepressant Claims
From CounterPunch/Bruce Levine, PhD: Once again, as with their reporting on WMDs in Iraq, the paper showed no skepticism about declarations from sources with powerful motives to sell a self-serving narrative that conflicts with the evidence.
Problem-Solving Through Skills-Building: Motivating Kids to Change
Children can overcome all sorts of difficulties by learning specific behavioural or emotional skills with the help and support of their social network.
A House on Shaky Ground: Eight Structural Flaws of the Western Worldview
From Tikkun/Jeremy Lent: Many of the ideas we hold sacrosanct in modern society are actually myths that emerged from erroneous assumptions made at different times and places in history.
Babies Feel Pain More Intensely Than Adults, Brain Imaging Study Finds
From Return to Now: Researchers found that babies are actually four times more sensitive to pain than adults, even though painful procedures are still routinely performed on them with no pain relief.
