Community

-On March 11, 2015, the NHS Foundation and three other Trusts are hosting a free conference to "take stock" after one year of Peer-supported Open Dialogue.

In this piece for the National Survivor User Network, Liz Sayce argues that people with mental health conditions will continue to stay silent about their...

From CBS Radio: U.K. doctors are increasingly prescribing social interventions — community based solutions such as art classes, gardening clubs, and walking groups — as an alternative...

The February International Review of Psychiatry focuses on recovery, from mental health "Trialogues" in Austria, to social equality in Canada, to policy shifts from...

From The Atlantic: A new movement called Authentic Relating is hosting events across the country where people participate in exercises and games to learn the...

When Wilda White recovered from a manic episode triggered by her ADHD medication, she had lost her relationship, her home, and her dream job as a public interest lawyer. She reached a turning point when, she told Seven Days newspaper, "in the course of trying to figure out what had happened to me, I went on the website Mad in America.” Through the site, she connected with a job listing from Vermont Psychiatric Survivors, a non-profit dedicated to empowering and protecting the rights of people labeled “mentally ill.” She is now their executive director.

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...

“Children from poorer families are more likely to experience changes in brain connectivity that put them at higher risk of depression, compared with children from more affluent families,” according to new research covered by Medical News Today. "Poverty doesn't put a child on a predetermined trajectory, but it behooves us to remember that adverse experiences early in life are influencing the development and function of the brain. And if we hope to intervene, we need to do it early so that we can help shift children onto the best possible developmental trajectories."

As we approach world hearing voices day 2013 Karen and I are in Canada. We have just enjoyed running a preconference workshop for about 100 people in Winnipeg. I am sitting in my room before breakfast writing this piece and as I sit I am thinking back twenty-three years ago; I am in a psych unit in Manchester and I have a new support worker called Lindsay. By then I had been a psych patient for almost ten years and was fast approaching spending the rest of my life in the system. My support worker had convinced me to go to a new group that was starting in Manchester called a hearing voices group.

Experience shapes the brain, for better or worse. Richard Davidson & Bruce McEwen review the ways that adverse early experience create measurable changes in...

New research provides evidence that police killings of unarmed Black Americans impact the mental health of Black Americans.

A cross-sectional study of 1,994 individuals in a deprived area of Japan found that perceived discrimination was significantly associated with depressive symptoms and a...

Website of Mind, U.K. Go to "Making Sense of Coming Off Psychiatric Drugs"                          ...

"Robin Williams’s body was scarcely cold when liberal commentators began using the tragedy of his death as publicity for suicide hotlines and professional mental...

Results reflect moderate to strong evidence in support of the non-pharmacological school-based interventions reviewed in the study.

In a study of conformance to evidence-based treatment recommendations at mental health clinics among people diagnosed with schizophrenia, Canadian researchers found that conformance to...

Writing on his 1 Boring Old Man blog, Dr. Mickey Nardo reflects on the media frenzy around the RAISE study and asks why the prescription data has not been released. He adds skepticism about the political motives of the potentially overblown results, which he sees as a clear push for increased mental health funding.

New research demonstrates the benefits and complexities for immigrants transitioning from undocumented to DACA status.

From Harvard Health Blog: A 2016 analysis found that women living in areas with higher levels of green vegetation had lower rates of mortality. Spending time...

In this piece for The Times, Josh Glancy reflects on the difficulty that many men experience in forming meaningful friendships, finding community, and building emotional...

Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin "is going to use this tragedy of losing our State Hospital during (hurricane) Irene as an opportunity to deliver the...

Minn Post did a feature story last week on Vail Place, an alternative mental health treatment center run on a community “clubhouse” model where the nearly 900 members and staff work side by side to run the center’s activities. Vail Place was founded in Hopkins, Minnesota in the early eighties by mental health activists and family members as a community for psychosocial rehabilitation. “The work isn’t therapy,” a member explains. “It’s growth. It’s ‘I cans’ rather than ‘I can'ts.’ And that’s important for mental health and survival.”

In this interview for The Atlantic, James Kugel speculates on the minds and experiences of ancient prophets through a neuroscientific lens, exploring how biblical people's sense of...

I recently had the great pleasure of hosting a Hearing Voices workshop with Ron Coleman and Karen Taylor. The response was overwhelmingly positive. Many people described this as one of the best trainings they had ever attended. Ron's message is inherently uplifting - after all this internationally known educator was once a mental patient given a poor prognosis. But in addition, they offered pragmatic suggestions for how to think about voices and talk to someone who is experiencing them.

Hugh Middleton, MD, Associate Professor at the School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Nottingham, and NHS Consultant Psychiatrist, Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust has written an interesting and worthwhile book, “Psychiatry Reconsidered, From Medical Treatment to Supportive Understanding.” Dr. Middleton is co-founder of the Critical Psychiatry Network and this book could serve as the foundational textbook for our field. As his academic appointment would suggest, he has a decidedly social perspective on the kinds of problems that bring many people to a psychiatrist’s attention, but in this book he offers eloquent discussions of many perspectives that inform our field. It is remarkable that in this 200 page text, he is able to cover so many topics – diagnosis, pharmacotherapy, schools of psychotherapy - with such clarity.