Intensive Home Treatment for Acute Mental Disorders: An Alternative to Hospitalization
Unlike hospital treatment, IHT is attentive to family issues and helping negotiate re-entry into work or school. It is also consistent with the recovery principle of least intrusive interventions.
CRPD Consultation on Deinstitutionalization: A Reparations Approach
The UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has announced a series of regional consultations on deinstitutionalization.
They Called for Help. They’d Always Regret It.
From The Atlantic: Two families called 911 to get help for their sons. They didn’t know that they’d be thrusting them into a complex and often brutal system.
Insane Medicine, Chapter 9: The Worried Parent (Part 1)
A discussion of a diagnosis-free approach to working with families called the Relational Awareness Program (RAP) and how family relationships become solidified through “Emotion WARS.”
The Problem With Mental Health Awareness
From The Nation: Campaigns telling people to become “aware” and “reach out” are, at best, an incorrect diagnosis of the problem and at worst, gaslighting.
Some Principles of Human Design for a Post-COVID World
This essay contributes a biologist’s perspective to identifying humanity’s fundamental needs in our necessary transition to a new world order.
How Frightened People Should Be Treated by Doctors – RD Laing
From Did You Used to be RD Laing?: "The ‘treatment’ that we give someone, is the way we treat that person. It should not be a noun, but an active verb."
An American History of Addiction, Part 5: Vietnam, Veterans, and Vermin
If addictions are existential, and not biological, at their core, then we can start to understand why addiction is not always chronically and progressively compulsive and obsessive.
Psychiatrists and Open Dialogue
Please join our international panel of psychiatrists on Friday, February 12 at noon Eastern U.S. time (5:00 pm London time) to discuss the crucial questions of bringing Open Dialogue to a world in crisis.
Asia’s Largest Psychiatric Clinic for Women
From DW Documentary: Asia’s largest psychiatric facility is home to 1,700 female patients—or "ghosts." Many were victims of violence, or simply rejected by their families.
Mainstream Mental Health Is Hazardous for Your Mental Health
"Mental health" going mainstream has not actually translated into more connection and healing. Instead, what is mainstream is an individual, isolating notion of "disease."
New Research Questions Safety of Esketamine for Depression
An analysis of FDA adverse event reports related to esketamine shows the potential for negative effects such as suicidal and self-injurious ideation.
Psychiatry and the Counterculture: An Interview with Health Historian Lucas Richert
Richard Sears interviews pharmaceutical industry scholar Lucas Richert about American counterculture and psychiatry in the 1970s.
Surge of Student Suicides Pushes Las Vegas Schools to Reopen
From The New York Times: Firmly linking teen suicides to school closings is difficult, but rising mental health emergencies point to the toll the pandemic lockdown is taking.
Researchers: “Antidepressants Should Be Avoided in Bipolar Depression”
New research finds that antidepressants are not effective for bipolar disorder and can worsen symptoms of mania.
Video Captures Patient Crawling Out of Hospital After Staff Dismiss Pleas for Help
From CBC: "They thought I was faking it because I was bipolar," said David Pontone. "There are no words to describe what I went through that night."
Attention! One Morning with a Roving Mind
The day was one long meditation—doing what the mind ordered with no effort to control it. This is the Zen state that monks seek but that physicians consider a mental disorder to be treated by amphetamines.
Dr. Pies and The Chemical Imbalance Deception
Dr. Pies claims that the "chemical imbalance" theory was never really professed by psychiatrists. Yet he himself wrote an essay in "Creative Nonfiction" in 1999 that purveyed it directly to the layperson.
Therapy Isn’t for Everyone
From Medium: For many of us, therapy is just another room where we are stared at and made to feel defective—and that’s if we can afford to go at all.
Grief and Its Potential Lessons
Within the current mental health paradigm, profound grief is often shoved into the universal category of depression and treated as a malfunction according to the biomedical model.
Tens of Thousands Relying on Social Media Support Groups to Withdraw From Antidepressants
From Sky News: Dr. Ed White discusses his recent report about the lack of medical support for people coming off antidepressants and the online support groups forming in its absence.
The Genesis of a New Approach to Mental Healthcare: 4Sight
David Straub describes his 4Sight Behavioral Model and CORE system for helping people work with their past and emotions.
Insane Medicine, Chapter 8: Treatment Traps and How to Get Out of Them (Part...
Sami Timimi provides a discussion of the ways medication may be helpful for some, and advice and information on discontinuing psychiatric drugs.
Facebook Groups Provide Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal Help When Doctors Don’t
A new study looks at how online communities provide information and support for patients experiencing psychiatric drug withdrawal.
Eyewitness to Psychiatry Functioning as a Conspiracy Theory-Based Cult
The psychiatric cult uses its conspiracy theory of the cause of human suffering to let society off the hook while it enforces society’s oppression.
