Holistic

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.

Innovative research methods and interventions could address socioeconomic disparities in academic achievement.

Training for conceptual competence in psychiatry provides a new way forward to address theoretical and philosophical issues in mental health research and practice.

Current suicide assessment practices of the VA are reductive and do not allow for the individual’s narrative to be heard.

A new study explores how mindfulness impacts self-compassion and meaning in life to increase mental health and wellbeing.

Study in Brazil demonstrates how the exploration of contextual determinants of distress in mental health care can inform therapeutic change.

Ayahuasca found to be effective in treating moderate to severe depression in low-income population.

My blood work indicated a host of issues that had been lurking under the surface of my “psychiatric diagnoses” for years. I’d seen various mental health professionals and none had recommended these types of tests, or stopped to think about any underlying factors, aside from the well-known “serotonin myth.”

In a new report, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to health, Dr. Dainius Pūras, calls for a move away from the biomedical model and “excessive use of psychotropic medicines.”

MIA’s Micah Ingle interviews Mary Watkins about reorienting psychology toward liberation and social justice.

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.

Criticisms of the DSM-5 spark alternative proposals and calls to reform diagnostic systems in the mental health field.

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

Study finds that traditional healers in South Africa, whose services are widely used by the country’s population, perform important suicide prevention work.

A new article reviews studies in the field of nutritional psychiatry and how nutrition can prevent and treat mental health issues.

A re-visioned approach to social psychiatry aims to understand the broad influence of social life on mental health.

Utilizing Maslow’s published books and essays, psychologist William Compton delineates common myths and attempts to respond to them.

Report presents new body-based therapeutic approach for shock and complex developmental trauma.

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

Contemporary empirical research explores new ways to conceptualize and heal racial trauma through anticolonial and sociohistorical lenses.

To help my non-recovery oriented colleagues understand the stigma/resentment associated with ‘borderline personality disorder,’ I simply mention this: “Let’s say I call you and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got a referral for you. She’s been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder . . .’” I need to go no further; without fail, my colleague will smile or laugh. We both know that such a referral is a no-no, so much so that it doesn’t even have to be mentioned; it is a given.

Study finds that 74% of patients with a psychotic disorder off antipsychotics at end of 10 years are in remission.

This is my story of forced psychiatric treatment as an eight-year-old girl, from my perspective as an adult mental health professional. Being held down kicking and screaming to be injected with a benzodiazepine is a human rights violation no child should endure for saying no to a pharmaceutical. In hindsight, when I reflect on that day, it feels like a form of child abuse.

A new study demonstrates that the practice of mindfulness may ease pain in a way that is mechanistically distinct from the placebo effect. Research, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, found that mindfulness meditation not only outperformed placebo and fake meditation for pain relief but that it also activated different brain regions than the placebo treatments.

Group-based MBSR and PCGT therapies effective as a complementary treatment for PTSD.