Art

A new documentary “Life, Animated,” which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, tells the story of a man with autism who learned to interact...

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...

In gaming magazine Polygon, Liana Kerzner reviews video games that weren't designed as "therapy," but include primary characters who are struggling with deep psychological...

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.’”

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.

"Is this the future of medicine?" asks Stephen Armstrong in the British Medical Journal. "Little Artie has been left at the doorstep of his...

New study investigates the acceptability of a phenomenologically informed, manual-based art therapy for clients diagnosed with moderate to severe depression.

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...

Men who report being self-reliant may be at greater risk of suicidal thinking.

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...

“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.”

I was told that I had only two choices: Do not have children, or take lithium while I was pregnant—the drug that posed the least amount of birth defects, and the very medication that had killed the painter in me years ago. I refused both options and set out on my own, and luckily found a willing psychiatrist to help me taper off the meds.

A new article, published in The Arts in Psychotherapy, describes the ways art therapy and mindfulness have benefitted refugees and asylum seekers in Hong Kong.

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...

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...

The LA Times reviews a new film about Irvin David Yalom, existential psychologist, emeritus professor of psychiatry at Stanford Unversity. "’Yalom's Cure’ dispenses an...

Everyone in the world is either touched by their own mental health issues or have had a family member affected. What if they directed their buying power to an organization that would use the profits to fund exciting mental health & recovery projects both in the developing world and in their own countries; projects that would be ethical, non-coercive, personal recovery-based, and were aimed at creating recovery communities? What if they could buy products, crafts, services, art, music, books from people who had experienced mental health issues, enabling them to set up their own businesses or buy from social co-operatives that enabled distressed people to work and earn a living wage?

From BBC: At Bethlem Royal Hospital, a psychiatric hospital in London, patients are given the opportunity to work in the hospital's art studios as part...

Relational therapy can be informed by the intersubjective dynamics observed in early childhood to facilitate the development of healthy relational patterns and a strong sense of self.

A new study finds that emotions may be represented by 27 categories, with each category relating to others in a more complex and continuous fashion than previously understood.

-Psychiatry Advisor reviews the scientific evidence about using video games and virtual reality tools in psychiatric treatment.

-When we "re-narrate" our own stories and identities, it may be an opportunity for either liberation or re-oppression.

Researchers recommend a ‘politically-informed focus', including activism, when assessing children and designing interventions in areas of chronic political violence.

Writing for CounterPunch, Paris Williams writes that when an individual is experiencing what has been termed “psychosis,” it is important to recognize that this may also be the manifestation of a breakdown in their larger social groups, the family, society, and even the species.

In AlterNet, Scott Barry Kaufman reviews the evidence that people who've been diagnosed with ADHD often have higher than average levels of creativity. He...