Community

People who reduced antipsychotic use by tapering were doing just as well after five years as those who continued using the drugs.

In my last three blogs I posed the question- "If madness isn't what psychiatry says it is, then what is it?" Now I'm asking-...

Shamans are the magician spirit healers in tribal, non-technological societies around the world. Anthropologists use the word “shamanism,” from the Tungus people of Siberia, to mean the commonalities between different traditions. Shamans find their calling through a life-threatening initiatory illness or crisis, go into visioning and trance to connect to other realities, shapeshift out of their regular identity to identify with animals, spirits, and even illnesses, and return to the ordinary world to share skills of healing and creativity. Living at the edge of society and defying conventional norms, conduct, and even gender, shamans are respected as a powerful community link to the divine.

Psychology can only deal with racial health disparities effectively by incorporating critical race theory and intervening at a structural level.

When separation and microaggressions are legitimized and put into public policy and discourse, we become second class citizens and subhumans. This is oppression and bigotry systemically supported and then denied by almost everyone, including those most seriously affected. We come to believe these lies.

This result calls into question popular notions about the correlations between personality and later-life achievement and health outcomes.

Depression, serious psychological distress, and suicide attempts have risen substantially since the early 2000s among young adults – what’s changed?

Meta-analytic study detects upsurge in patterns of perfectionism in young adults and explores how neoliberalism contributes to this trend.

Hearing Voices Network self-help groups are an important resource for coping with voice hearing, study finds.

We have just celebrated the anniversary of the rapidly expanding global Hearing Voices Movement which was founded more than twenty-five years ago following the ground-breaking research of Professor Marius Romme and Dr Sandra Escher. Romme and Escher have advocated for a radical shift in the way we understand the phenomenon of Hearing Voices; in contrast to traditional, biomedical psychiatry which views voices as an aberrant by-product of genetic, brain and cognitive faults, their research has firmly established that voices make sense when taking into account the traumatic circumstances that frequently provoke them.

Individuals with long-term mental health conditions identify pets as valuable supports in their daily lives.

Researchers argue that blaming climate change inaction on psychological barriers ignores the effects of neoliberal capitalism and social structures.

Paxil Progress is a forum for people engaged in withdrawal from Paxil. It also offers adverse drug reaction reporting, FDA Warnings, published withdrawal studies,...

Debate ensues as scholars and policymakers discuss how to bring a rights-based approach to mental health policy.

Scrooge’s character was forged from his own emotional pain. Indeed, we can change the course of our lives through facing and mourning that pain. Want, deprivation and cruelty create the evils of the world. Mourning and trust, in the context of love, are its antidotes. 

Structural competency in psychiatry emphasizes the social factors shaping patient presentations and encourages physician advocacy.

Researchers examine the transformation of work, life, and identity in India as a result of Western corporate and psychological culture.

After 25 years of chronic emergency, 22 mental hospitalizations, a stint at a “community mental health center,” 13 years in a "board & care," repeated withdrawals from addictions to legal drugs, and a 12-year marriage, I plan to live every last breath out as a survivor, an advocate, and an artist.

If I had a clinical problem, why was something as ancient and simple as meditation helping me? And if normal positive human habits could be so profoundly useful, why the heck was the field marketing pills and “clinical” coping mechanisms to me instead? This frustration helped me jump ship from the medical mindset and hop into the world of humanity.

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.

14-year study of a rural sample in China shows those who were married had higher rates of remission from schizophrenia.

Researchers distinguish between two different forms of perspective taking and examine their impact on helpers’ wellbeing.

A new study suggests that most people diagnosed with depressive, anxiety, and substance abuse disorders recover without treatment within a year of diagnosis. “This...

Race often determines whether school punishment or therapy and drugs will be used to address children’s problem behaviors.

The time has come that the fictitious ADHD qualifies for my ‘Enough is Enough’ series. It’s time to stop addressing pharmaceutical psychiatry on its own terms: its fraudulent and corrupt 'science,' its spurious 'evidence base,' and its imaginary psychiatric ‘diseases.’ I’m done with this. The evidence is in. Let’s get real. Psychiatry has become a profession of drug pushers. As a psychiatrist I am beyond troubled. Let’s get real.