Mental Well-Being and Engagement in the Arts
Public health researchers at the University of Western Australia examined the relationship between recreational arts engagement and mental well-being in the general population. The results, which have implications for policy makers as well as health practitioners, indicate that those who engage with the arts for two or more hours per week have significantly better mental well-being.
Envisioning Psychiatric Drug Freedom
Psychiatric meds can shut down the emotions and consciousness enough to make it possible to tolerate dynamics that would inspire rage or surges of empowered activity without the meds. It can be helpful to look closely at these blocks and start to create a map to freedom, understanding that it is a complex process that involves not only the physiology of the body of the individual taking meds, but the architecture of the social system around that person.
Using Paint, Pen on Paper or Song to Revisit Trauma
From The Conversation: The literary, visual, and performing arts can play an important role in helping people process trauma, especially for those who have difficulty...
Mental Health Digest February 2017
A new issue of the Mental Health Digest newsletter is now available. This issue includes an overview of art therapy as well as information about the impact...
How are Professional Artists Similar and Different from People Diagnosed with Schizophrenia?
People "who are prone to psychosis" in its most "extreme" forms, such as delusions, hallucinations, and disorganized thought, have been found to also show...
Inner Fire: Healing and Recovery Without Meds
For five years, I and others worked to create a residential healing community in Brookline, Vermont, where people could recover from debilitating and traumatic life experiences, which often lead to addiction and mental health challenges, without the use of psychotropic medications. We welcomed our first six seekers to a yearlong, therapeutic and farm-based, day program last September, and we now can report on what we have learned during this time.
Can Cultural Engagement Protect Against Depression?
A new study examines the preventative effects of cultural engagement has on depression among older adults.
Arts Participation May Improve Mental Well-Being and Social Inclusion
Introductory arts courses at Open Arts Essex show improvements in mental well-being and social inclusion for individuals with mental health challenges.
Creatively Managing Voice-Hearing Through Spiritual Writing
I am a psychiatric survivor of over thirty-six years. Since my nervous breakdown in 1978, I have undergone multitudinous experiences ranging from the subtly humiliating to the horrifically debilitating at the hands of incompetent psychiatrists and psychopharmacologists who, in the name of medicine, did more harm than good.
Psychodynamic Therapy Revealed to be as Efficacious as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Meta-analytic study finds that psychodynamic therapy outcomes are equivalent to those of CBT and other empirically supported treatments.
Karen Pence Picks a Cause, and Art Therapists Feel Angst
From the New York Times: On Inauguration Day, Karen Pence announced her support for the mental health profession of art therapy. While many art therapists...
Soteria: Reflections on “Being With”
From the Foundation for Excellence in Mental Health Care: Yana Jacobs, LMFT reflects on her experiences providing art therapy at a Soteria House and "being...
Therapeutic Video Games?
King5 News reports on video games that are being designed by psychologists to help players deal with emotional problems like anxiety and depression. Cheri...
The Therapist who Saved my Life
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...
Re-telling Our Stories: Liberation or Re-oppression?
-When we "re-narrate" our own stories and identities, it may be an opportunity for either liberation or re-oppression.
Saved by the Book: Can Reading be More Effective than Medication or Therapy?
“Studies show that self-help books can resolve readers’ depressed moods, change ingrained thought patterns, and instill a renewed zest for life – as long as the advice within is scientifically sound,” Elizabeth Svoboda writes for Aeon. “The literature we choose to guide us should supply proven advice we can trust. But it should also, as Franz Kafka wrote, be ‘the axe for the frozen sea within us’, bludgeoning us in ways that awaken us to the extraordinary.”
A Mental Patient’s View of the Body
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.
Webinar Discussion – Rethinking Madness
A free recording of last week's webinar anchored to Phil Borges' Crazywise, a documentary exploring alternative approaches to mental health, is now available. Over 4,000 people...
Histories of Violence: Neurodiversity and the Policing of the Norm
In this interview for the Los Angeles Review of Books, cultural theorist and philosopher Erin Manning discusses neurodiversity, a movement that seeks to depathologize traits, experiences, and...
Mad Pride: Making a Truce With the Voices in Your Head
In this piece for Vice, Tess McClure describes New Zealand's Mad Pride movement, a movement that seeks to destigmatize, normalize, and celebrate experiences of voice-hearing...
Art and Images in Psychiatry
Between 2002 and 2014, JAMA Psychiatry published monthly essays by Dr. James C. Harris exploring the role of visual arts in representing emotional distress, trauma, life...
Sunday FM: Music Therapy Comes to Life in Documentary
A new documentary coming to theatres around the US over the next few months explores Dan Cohen's Music and Memory program and its emotional...
“Mindfulness at Risk of Being ‘Turned into a Free Market Commodity’”
The Guardian reports growing concerns from the Buddhist Society conference: “Jon Kabat-Zinn, who created the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine at the University of Massachusetts medical school, warned last week that some people feared a ‘sort of superficial ‘McMindfulness’ is taking over, which ignores the ethical foundations of the meditative practices and traditions from which mindfulness has emerged, and divorces it from its profoundly transformative potential.’”
Birthday Letter: Sylvia Plath and “Daddy”
In this piece for The Paris Review, Belinda McKeon analyzes the poetry and letters Sylvia Plath wrote in the few months just before her suicide.
“Therapy Wars: The Revenge of Freud”
Writing in The Guardian, Oliver Burkeman discusses the comeback of Freud’s psychoanalysis, along with humanistic therapy, interpersonal therapy, transpersonal therapy, and transactional analysis and...
