Not Everyone Wants to Silence the Voices in Their Heads
From Science of Us: There seems to be a growing interest in the concept of healthy voice-hearing. The idea that hearing voices may not be...
“Therapy Wars: The Revenge of Freud”
Writing in The Guardian, Oliver Burkeman discusses the comeback of Freud’s psychoanalysis, along with humanistic therapy, interpersonal therapy, transpersonal therapy, and transactional analysis and...
“Veterans Let Slip the Masks of War: Can This Art Therapy Ease PTSD?”
“Service members suffering from PTSD often feel like they’re wearing a mask,” Samantha Allen writes in Invisible Wounds. Melissa Walker, an art therapist, asks them to make one. “The results are stirring. One mask, striped in red and black with hollow chrome-colored eyes, is wrapped in razor wire with a lock where its mouth should be.”
“How We Label People with ‘Mental Illness’ Influences Tolerance”
Honor Whiteman reports on a study in The Journal of Counseling & Development, which found that people may be less tolerant of an individual...
Psychics Who Hear Voices Could Be on to Something
In this piece for The Atlantic, Joseph Frankel compares and contrasts the voice-hearing experiences of self-described psychics and mediums with the experiences of people diagnosed with...
Anyone Can Be Trained to Hallucinate
From Flipboard: In a recent study on auditory hallucinations, all participants — not just those who had been diagnosed with psychosis — experienced conditioned hallucinations. The study...
Do Voice Hearers Have the Right to Refuse Psychiatric Drugs?
In this piece for STAT, Shirley S. Wang discusses the Hearing Voices Network and its non-pathologizing, rights-affirming approach to hearing voices and alternative realities.
"Many recovered...
Saved by the Book: Can Reading be More Effective than Medication or Therapy?
“Studies show that self-help books can resolve readers’ depressed moods, change ingrained thought patterns, and instill a renewed zest for life – as long as the advice within is scientifically sound,” Elizabeth Svoboda writes for Aeon. “The literature we choose to guide us should supply proven advice we can trust. But it should also, as Franz Kafka wrote, be ‘the axe for the frozen sea within us’, bludgeoning us in ways that awaken us to the extraordinary.”
Schizophrenia’s Tangled Roots
From Sapiens: Researchers are increasingly recognizing the role that social and environmental factors, including childhood abuse, stressful events, and poverty, play in the development of...
First-ever Peer-supported Open Dialogue Conference
-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.
“Open Dialogue: Finland’s Alternative Approach to Mental Illness”
"Almost 30 years ago a group of clinicians in Finland decided to treat psychosis differently. Their approach, known as Open Dialogue, has impressive recovery...
“Helping Others Dampens the Effects of Everyday Stress”
"The holiday season can be a very stressful time, so think about giving directions, asking someone if they need help, or holding that elevator...
“Psychiatry’s Mind-Brain Problem”
A New York Times Op-Ed by Cornell psychiatry professor George Makari connects the surprise over the results of the widely-covered RAISE study to American psychiatry’s shift toward pharmacology and the oversimplification of disorders as brain diseases.
New Medications Fail to Show Efficacy for Alzheimer’s Disease
Three phase III clinical trials assessing the efficacy of Lundbeck’s investigational drug idalopirdine for Alzheimer’s disease have failed
Tom Arnkil on “Unconditional Respect for the ‘Otherness’ of Other People”
Tom Arnkil on the book he co-authored with Jaakko Seikkula, and the necessity for the "Unconditional Respect for the 'Otherness' of Other People."
“How Meditation Changes the Brain and Body”
In the New York Times Well Blog, Gretchen Reynolds covers a study published in Biological Psychiatry showing that mindfulness meditation, unlike a placebo, “can change...
Letters to the Editor: “The Treatment of Choice”
Readers respond to the New York Times article, “The Treatment of Choice,” about innovative programs for psychosis and schizophrenia that involve patients and their families in treatment decisions. “Narratives of success counter a drumbeat of faulty links of mental illness and violence, inaccuracies which serve only to further stigmatize and isolate individuals with psychiatric illness.”
“What Are Delusions – And How Best Can We Treat Them?”
For The Conversation, psychologist John Done, from the University of Hertfordshire, explains his approach to discussing delusions with his patients. Done recommends more qualitative...
The Fictions and Futures of Transformative Justice
In this interview for The New Inquiry, two co-editors and three writers of Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements discuss prison abolition and...
“Does Psychoanalysis Have a Role in Modern Mental Health Care?”
Lynne Malcolm, for ABC’s All In the Mind program, interviews three psychoanalysts about how their field remains “relevant and useful in the contemporary therapeutic...
Storytelling Therapy for Trauma and Bullying
A study out of the University of Buffalo explores the use of Narrative Exposure Therapy to treat youth PTSD and substance abuse. “Trauma is...
Call For Abstracts: Philosophical Perspectives on Critical Psychiatry
The Association for Advancement in Philosophy and Psychiatry is issuing a call for abstracts, with a particular interest in submissions from service users. The...
“The Surprising Reason Psychotherapy Works”
For Psychology Today, David Elkins writes that “psychotherapy's power to heal lies mainly in its human and relational aspects,” rather than any specific techniques...
Mental Health Industry Should Embrace Choices Beyond Drugs
In this video for NowThis, Yana Jacobs critiques the mental health industry standard of prescribing drugs as the first-line treatment for "mental illness." She emphasizes...
“Does Psychotherapy Research with Trauma Survivors Underestimate the Patient-Therapist Relationship?”
Joan Cook, professor of Psychology at Yale, writes than in her work with military veterans she realized that her psychotherapy techniques mattered much less than her training had indicated. Instead, what mattered was “the bond forged over years of therapy,” known as “the therapeutic alliance.”
