Non-drug Approaches

A video recording of the 2nd Lambeth and Southwark Mind Annual Lecture held in conjunction with BLOCK336 is now available. In this lecture, Dorothée...

It is time to create an entirely voluntary psychiatric system. International conscience is clear. The singling out of people with psychosocial disabilities is not worthy of a free society. There are better, safer ways to address legitimate public needs.

A new study examines the effects of midlife exercise on depression and cardiovascular health later in life.

In this video, comedian Sarah Silverman recounts her journey with mental health treatment and discusses how therapy has helped her.

Understanding schizophrenia as a non-enigmatic, understandable human experience goes against a history of institutional “othering” that has sustained psychiatric legitimacy and further marginalized service-users.

From Harper's Magazine: People who hear positive, encouraging voices often seen as spiritual guides or messages and people diagnosed with schizophrenia are usually thought of as...

Race often determines whether school punishment or therapy and drugs will be used to address children’s problem behaviors.

A new article reviews studies in the field of nutritional psychiatry and how nutrition can prevent and treat mental health issues.

Researchers find that valproate decreases brain volume in a region associated with emotion processing across all participants.

Jack Bragen writes in the Berkeley Daily Planet about the impacts on people's minds of the war and violence going on around them. "Someone...

From Wellcome Collection: It has long been assumed that great writers and artists must be touched by madness. However, no link between artistic talent and...

Could the whole array of psychiatric diagnostic categories, to the extent that they have any validity at all, be expressions of the failure to love and to accept love? Do successful psychotherapies really work by means of the therapist’s ability to encourage people to experience love through how positively he or she relates to them?

In 20 years of inpatient hospitalization, the psychiatrists that I encountered focused almost exclusively on treating my diseased mind and had no concept or interest in the body. While the wheels of “progress” turn slowly in mental health, I hope that along with ongoing advocacy there will be a focus on responsible health counseling and supporting people in healthier eating and living.

In this piece for Rest for Resistance, Dom Chatterjee discusses the white-centricism of mental health as well as the specific ways that the mental health system...

Sometimes it's the simple things that keep us going, especially when the complicated ones seem so overwhelming; when there's too much chaos, too many emotions, too many possibilities and impending disasters. No one can give you a reason to live. You have to find it for yourself. Until you do, try simple things. For me, it was a turtle.

For NPR’s 13.7: Cosmos and Culture blog, philosopher Alva Noë comments on a new Oxford journal, Neuroscience of Consciousness. He is skeptical of the persistent tendency of some neuroscientists “to think of consciousness itself as a neural phenomenon.” His own view, he writes “is that the brain is only part of the story, and that we can only begin to understand how the brain makes us consciousness by realizing that brain functions only in the setting of our bodies and our broader environmental (including our social and cultural) situation.”

Anthropologists study Parachute NYC to identify challenges and opportunities for implementing peer support and Open Dialogue practices.

Hope heals. Thousand of years of experience and, more recently, numerous hope studies, prove this to be true. Yet hope is still a 4-letter word in many mental health settings. How can we build a bridge to hope from hope-stealing physical and emotional pain, hopeless diagnoses and prognoses, and hope-numbing side effects?

In this creative nonfiction piece for Literary Hub, one woman shares her story of trauma, depression, and suicidality, and recounts the unconventional approach of the...

I am a very optimistic psychologist, but with reason. For 25 years I've been working with people who have had psychological problems in every conceivable area. Many psychologists have problems with burnout, especially early in their careers. For me, this has been very different. By using the treatment techniques that I do, I feel anti-burned out. It is so gratifying to see people get out of their serious problems, that I look forward to every day of clinical work.

A sample of 276 youth recruited from 2 juvenile detention centers found that the association between trauma exposure and callous-unemotional traits was mediated by...

We need to burn through some darkness before we collectively see the light. The light is a palpable shift toward reaching for human connection; toward opening our hearts and our minds and intentionally focusing on the positive future that wants to emerge.

For three days in December, I was fortunate enough to attend the Hearing Voices Facilitator Training held in Portland, OR. This training expanded my understanding of the voice hearing experience and equipped me with a number of tools to use in facilitating hearing voices support groups. Grounded in a feeling of community, the training was dynamic, emotionally therapeutic, and educational all at the same time – a crystal clear example of how support groups themselves might manifest in the lives of their members.

The producers of “Healing Voices” ­‐ a new social action documentary about mental health ­‐ are releasing the film via community screening partners in...

Now is the time to harness our individual stories, our collective stories, to counter the negative and hateful stories painted about us in the media. We need to push back with stories of our own. Stories that give people hope. We will be filming, for the Obama administration's campaign to encourage discussion of mental health issues, as many people as possible telling their stories of how they built a life of meaning and purpose; what helped, what hurt, and what they see as promising policy directions.