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The first time I tried to kill myself, I was 14. I won’t go into the indignity of being involuntarily locked up, time after time, until I satisfactorily convinced the staff that I wouldn’t harm myself or attempt suicide again. (I was lying.) The system taught me to lie, to hide my suicidal feelings in order to escape yet another round of dehumanizing lock-ups and “treatments.”

Systematic review suggests social prescribing benefits individuals with mental and physical health issues, but more program evaluations are needed.

Rufus May, Ph.d., also known as "The Doctor Who Hears Voices," is a clinical psychologist who has also been forcibly hospitalized, medicated, and diagnosed...

While I have lived just a few miles away from the Capitol for the last fifteen years, I have been unsure about getting involved in legislative advocacy. I’ve been intimidated by the complexity of the legislative process, and more inclined to leave it up to others who I perceive as having more experience than me. And honestly, I haven’t felt very hopeful about effecting change. My cynicism had turned to “learned helplessness.” And then along came a mental health bill so destructive, so regressive, that I had to step out of my uncomfortable comfort zone.

Eighteen years ago, in the fall of 1996, I plunged into a major depression that almost killed me. Over the next eighteen years I took what I had learned in my healing and put together a mental health recovery program which I taught through my books, support groups and long distance telephone coaching. In the process, I counseled many people who were in the same desperate straights that I had been in. I shared with them what I had learned through my ordeal---that if you set the intention to heal, reach out for support, and use a combination of mutually supportive therapies to treat your symptoms, you will make it through this. And in the cases where people used these strategies and hung there, they eventually were able, like myself, to emerge from the hell of depression.

Listen: NPR’s On Point with Tom Ashbrook discusses the new book “Moody Bitches: The Truth About the Drugs You’re Taking, The Sleep You’re Missing, the Sex You’re Not Having and What’s Really Making You Crazy,” by the psychiatrist Julie Holland.

A special issue explores the connection between poverty, mental health, and psychotherapy.

Researchers in Brazil followed sixteen individuals after a first-episode psychotic experience to understand their subjective experience of recovery.  They found that the participants described...

David Oaks, whose 1998 challenge to "check out the research for yourself" led Robert Whitaker to write Mad in America and create this website,...

My opposition to psychiatric drugs is not just that they are harmful, dangerous, and destructive. That would be plenty motivation enough. And it is. But in addition, my profession, which I love and value, has been hijacked by the APA and Big Pharma. It is my goal to return psychiatry to its proper place - where good psychotherapy is understood to be the treatment for human suffering.

The Mental Health Commission of Canada will release an interim report this summer of its nationwide "Housing First" study - 1000 people with mental...

"What was going on inside Turning Point was an experiment: a community-based treatment center designed to serve low-income African-Americans. After a few bumpy early...

How is it that we allow the agendas of others to occupy our childrens’ minds? Is it possible that a stranger can know our child better than we do? Is there anything a baby needs to learn that can’t be taught by being held in a parent’s arms? Because my children’s eyes and ears and thoughts are on me every day, they are key players in my ongoing efforts to live a right life. I count on their eyes and ears and thoughts to shore me up during times of temptation. They always lead me home.

A new study investigates the relationships between early-home environmental factors and later-life physiological response to psychosocial stressors.

Will Hall's Harm Reduction Guide, published by the Icarus Project and Freedom Center.

My public writing has brought my mother and I closer together than we’ve been in decades. There have been disagreements. But now, my almost ninety-year-old mother tells me she reads everything I write. She recently told me that she’s glad I see things so clearly.

A new study finds that a school-based yoga program improves third graders’ emotional and psychosocial quality of life.

As the Global Mental Health Movement attempts to address cross-cultural mental health disparities, a new article encourages integrating traditional healing practices with psychotherapy.

In two separate studies (one replicating the other) of 102 people with schizophrenia diagnoses researchers from McGill, UCLA, CSU, UNC, Columbia and the VA...

In my last blog, I talked about how I was attempting to cope with a “mini-relapse” without using psychiatric drugs. One Sunday morning in the midst of this episode I awoke in a particularly dismal state. I didn’t have a structure planned for the day. And without something to look forward to, both my anxiety and depression increased.

Researchers find that support and self-care were helpful for users during discontinuation, but that mental health professionals were not very helpful.

A randomized control trial finds that receiving peer support from individuals with similar lived experiences reduces one’s risk of readmission to an acute crisis unit.

From The Atlantic: For some people, believing false information is not a result of low intelligence or lack of education, but the desire to...

On May 5, 2012,  MindFreedom International is holding its Occupy the American Psychiatric Association protest at the APA's annual convention in Philadelphia.  Momentum is building for the...

Psychologists and people with experience of psychotic symptoms publish a report on new ways of understanding psychosis.