Community

During the 1970s, the head of schizophrenia studies at the NIMH, Loren Mosher, conducted an experiment that compared treatment in a homelike environment (called...

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

Are White Americans’ poor mental health outcomes caused by Whiteness?

Can a renewed biopsychosocial approach, grounded in an updated philosophy, foster person-centered medicine, and psychiatry?

"There is a need of a shift in investments in mental health, from focusing on 'chemical imbalances' to focusing on 'power imbalances' and inequalities"

Kev Harding argues against conceptualizations of therapy as a ‘cure’ to an ‘illness’ and instead offers alternative approaches.

The 90s were labeled - rather optimistically - as the ‘decade of recovery.’ More recently, recovery has been placed slap bang central in mental health policy. Is supporting recovery pretty much good common sense? Or is the term being misused to pressure those suffering to behave in certain ways?

As noted in Anatomy of an Epidemic, the prognosis for someone experiencing psychosis is far better in developing countries than in industrialized countries. Robert Whitaker and others posit that this is due to the treatment models used in the developing world, as well as to debility and chronicity caused by psychiatric drugs themselves. I think it's also important to explore traditional tribal and village based models of helping people experiencing psychosis and examine why they may be effective. Do these traditional societies know something we don't?

We are wired for community. If we disconnect, our bodies will call us back to the sense of human connection that we are wired for, using the unexpected language of inflammation.

Much of the wild world is now a garden: a rational, controlled space. Yet if we step out of the garden and back into the old growth, I believe the process of psychosis belongs as part of Earth’s “will,” of her wild. The physiological process of psychosis—that of amplified senses—is ecologically purposeful. Not good nor bad, but part of what Nature does trying to grow. Here I share a talk I gave in Boulder, Colorado exploring these themes.

One of the HVN's fundamental principles is that "the person having these experiences is in the best position to decide or discover what they mean" and thus each person must "not try to speak for" another. The challenge for a family group will likely be for members to move past speaking about our loved ones to find or imagine the space where we ourselves are liberated.

As a trauma survivor growing up in various adolescent mental health systems, I never learned any useful self-care tools or practices. I was taught that my current coping skills (self-injury, suicidal behavior, illicit drug use) were unacceptable, but not given any ideas as to what to replace them with. No one seemed to want to know much about the early childhood traumas that were driving these behaviors. Instead, I collected an assortment of diagnoses. I was told that I would be forever dependent on mediated relationships with professionals, and an ever-changing combination of pills. The message was that my troubles were chemical in nature and largely beyond my control.

Changing the mental health and psychosocial support system in Germany requires public debate about the ways our society should help and support people in mental crisis and with chronic mental health problems. We believe the driving force behind all help and support should be humanitarianism and respect for inalienable human rights.

A new study explores how “psychosis” and “schizophrenia” are viewed within the Māori community in New Zealand.

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

Researcher Dr. Silke Schwarz highlights how Western psychology’s construction of individual resilience deflects emphasized individual pathology and deflects efforts at structural change.

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.

Dr. Gail Hornstein, author of Agnes’s Jacket: A Psychologist’s Search for the Meanings of Madness, discusses the importance of personal narratives and service-user activism in the context of the global mental health movement.

A mental health social entrepreneurship is a business that uses market principles to maximize benefit instead of maximizing profit. For instance, my business, Wellness...

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

Vanderbilt University psychiatrist Jonathan Metzl, author of The Protest Psychosis, has published a brief history of "schizophrenia" in relation to African American culture in...

Practitioners and public leaders identify methods and barriers for integrating those diagnosed with mental health issues into community life.

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.

BPS releases report encouraging behavioral interventions for people with dementia, rather than antipsychotics

Yale's Program for Recovery and Community Health will publish in World Psychiatry's June issue a review the history of peer support, from its roots...