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Bruce Levine speaks about Nelson Algren, Phil Ochs, Marginalization, the Mental Health Industry, and the Occupy Movement at the 23rd Annual Nelson Algren Birthday...

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.

The Toronto Globe & Mail reports on a project to provide "microfinance" loans of $3,000 up to $25,000 to people diagnosed with mental illness...

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

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.

I was contacted on one occasion to conduct an assessment and consult with a family in regards to their son who was in his...

Teacher’s personal wellbeing plays a role in students’ mental health outcomes, suggests a new study.

Researchers seek to identify adaptive coping responses to discrimination for the transgender and gender diverse community.

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

Compendium of experience from 28 people around the world who have gone through withdrawal, along with the contributions of eight professionals on how they...

In these days with limited access to mental health facilities, and when in-patient or out patient treatment might be focused on invasive treatments and not on recovery, you may be tempted to "provide sanctuary" for a friend or family member who is experiencing serious mental health challenges. Many of you have probably already done this.

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

With the ties between traumatic childhood experiences and mental health issues, should we continue to focus on biological approaches?

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

A touching article in the Las Vegas Sun follows one child from abandonment through foster placements, polypharmacy, suicidality, delinquency and homelessness to stability off...

Kingsley Hall was the first of Laing’s household communities that served as a place where you could live through madness until you could get it together and live independently. It was conceived as an “asylum” from forms of treatment — psychiatric or otherwise — that many were convinced were not helpful, and even contributed to their difficulties. By the time I arrived in London in 1973 to study with Laing there were four or five such places. Getting in wasn’t easy.

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...

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

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. 

We had built relationships with provider and peer organizations and NAMI. We had learned how to interface with the system and share the peer perspective. Ultimately, our relationships saved us. We had worked to start our own organization with the same providers who now were in position to step forward in our defense.

A new study examines the preventative effects of school-based mental health care when delivered by school personnel.

Soteria-Alaska, a program modeled after the highly effective Soteria developed in the 1970s by the late Loren Mosher, M.D., opened its doors in 2009. It is also impossible to convey the actual simplicity which in fact is the crowning jewel of the Soteria approach. A conservative review of the effectiveness of the Soteria approach revealed that it is at least as effective as traditional hospital-based treatment — without the use of antipsychotic medication as the primary treatment. Considering that people treated in the conventional way die on average 25 years younger than the general population, this is a substantial finding.

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

People have been wondering on this site lately if there is still a role for psychiatrists. The short answer is maybe, if they can...

Study counters previous evidence supporting multisystemic therapy, finding adolescents are just as likely to have out-of-home placements when receiving multisystemic therapy versus management as usual.