Holistic

Prominent researchers in psychiatry urge the field to move away from a rigid biological focus toward social and psychological perspectives to meet the needs of today’s world.

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

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

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.”

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.

New article pushes for a shift from a psychiatry centered on brain circuitry toward an 'ecosocial' view of mind, brain, and culture.

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

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

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

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.”

Study reports on the less-examined findings of difficult and painful meditation-related experiences.

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

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

I have wanted to go public with my story ever since I started getting so dramatically better via holistic means, but I consistently chickened out. It wasn’t until I hopped on a plane to Boston to meet other psychiatric survivors at the Mad in America Film Festival in 2014 that I found the community and forum to do so.

A recent RCT showed that vitamin B6 is as effective as propranolol for the treatment of akathisia.

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.

For five years, I and others worked to create a residential healing community in Brookline, Vermont, where people could recover from debilitating and traumatic life experiences, which often lead to addiction and mental health challenges, without the use of psychotropic medications. We welcomed our first six seekers to a yearlong, therapeutic and farm-based, day program last September, and we now can report on what we have learned during this time.

Trauma-informed approaches have the potential to promote recovery but must involve survivors and service-users to prevent the experience of retraumatization within psychiatric and mental health services.

What media hype and those selling mindfulness don’t tell you is that mindfulness is a process that can radically transform you, and it’s not always safe, nor is it easy or straightforward. We make it safer by being aware of the risks and learning to listen to our own bodies about when it is or isn’t okay for us. No one else actually knows.

A new study explores feelings of belongingness as a protective factor for childhood trauma and adult mental health outcomes.

New review ties increased screen time to increasing anxiety and depression among young adults throughout the United States.

In 1959, my mother suffered what people referred to as a nervous breakdown after my sister’s birth. I puzzled over why Mom never recovered, until I found Dad’s collection of medical records in my sister’s attic. How could anyone give a nursing mother with three small children so many drugs in such a short period of time?

New research suggests that when parents model emotion suppression strategies in social interactions, their children’s approaches to social engagement may suffer.

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

How did I become someone who could barely function? I was a high-performing sales executive ranked in the top 2% of an international business communications company. But now, after using powerful psych meds for depression and anxiety for more than a decade, I couldn’t do basic things like go to the grocery store, plan a meal, make dinner, or get together with friends.