Reimagining Healthcare

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The conventional Western classification systems of health conditions are based on flawed science shaped by reductionist, hierarchical, and profit-driven ideologies. THEN wants to create a new paradigm built upon principles drawn from systems science, the life course perspective, developmental neurobiology, and other evidence-informed studies.

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation No Better Than Placebo for Treatment-Resistant Depression

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A new study in JAMA Psychiatry found that transcranial magnetic stimulation was no better than placebo for treatment-resistant depression.

Traditional South African Healers Use Connection in Suicide Prevention

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

Study Finds Hearing Voices Groups Improve Social and Emotional Wellbeing

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

BPS Releases Review of Alternatives to Antipsychotics

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BPS releases report encouraging behavioral interventions for people with dementia, rather than antipsychotics

Psychologist Debunks Common Misconceptions of Maslow’s Hierarchy

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

New Study Investigates Negative Side Effects of Therapy

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Researchers find that nearly half of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) patients experience treatment side effects.

Constructing Alternatives to the DSM: An Interview with Dr. Jonathan Raskin

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Dr. Raskin discusses psychotherapists’ dissatisfaction with current psychiatric diagnostic systems and explores alternatives.

German Psychologists Declare “the Drugs Don’t Work”

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JĂźrgen Margraf and Silvia Schneider, both well-known psychologists at the University of Bochum in Germany, claim that psychotropic drugs are no solution to mental...

New Data Supports Acupuncture as a Treatment for Depression

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Researchers found acupuncture effective in the treatment of chronic pain and depression

In Honor of Fear and Pain

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Our use of antidepressants has turned single-episode struggles that recovered 85% of the time within one year, never to recur, into chronic and debilitating disorders that hold patients hostage in their own arrested development. But, If you are in the hole of pain, here’s what I have to say to you. It’s what I say to my patients, and what I tell myself in times of struggle.

Recovery: Compromise or Liberation?

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The 90s were labeled - rather optimistically - as the ‘decade of recovery.’ More recently, recovery has been placed slap bang central in mental health policy. Is supporting recovery pretty much good common sense? Or is the term being misused to pressure those suffering to behave in certain ways?

United Nations Report Calls for Revolution in Mental Health Care

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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.”

Developing Alternatives to the DSM for Psychotherapists

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A new article suggests counselors and psychotherapists are dissatisfied with current diagnostic systems and outlines some potential alternatives.

Nutrition, Sleep, and Mental Health

It was somewhat surprising 15+ years ago when Bonnie first began to be challenged (by psychiatrists in particular, who are always being asked about adverse side effects) to answer this question: what are the side effects of taking a broad-spectrum formula? In all these ensuing years, the answer has not changed from her first observations: people repeatedly tell us that in addition to improved mental health and cognitive clarity, they sleep better and they experience relief of constipation. Now, finally, we have evidence for the first of those two ‘side effects’ in the form of an excellent study

Robert Whitaker Missed the Mark on Drugs and Disability: A Call for a Focus...

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Robert Whitaker extended one of his core arguments from Anatomy of an Epidemic in a blog post last week. His argument revolves around the claim that psychiatric drugs are the principal cause of increasing psychiatric disability, as measured by U.S. social security disability claims. But does this really explain the rise in recipients of these SSI & SSDI benefits?

Peer Support in Mental Health: Exploitive, Transformative, or Both?

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The first time I tried to write about peer support—that emerging form of “service delivery” in which one person in recovery from what is described in the field as a “serious mental illness” offers support to another person who is in distress or struggling with a mental health condition—was in 1994. The manuscript was summarily rejected from an academic journal as representing what one of the reviewers described as “unsubstantiated rot.” That same article was eventually published 5 years later, and used by the President’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health to support its recommendation that peer supports be implemented across the country. Now, more than a decade later and as peer support arrives at something of a crossroads, both of these reactions remain instructive.
mental health maze

Functional Medicine: My Path Out of Psychiatry

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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.”

Prominent Researcher and Psychotherapist Questions “Evidence-Based Therapy”

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Dr. Johnathan Shedler recently published a paper critiquing how the term “evidence-based” is being used in the field of psychotherapy.
domestic violence mental health

I Navigated the Mental Health System and Never Took Medications

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I kept thinking, why was I the one to be labeled when my husband was doing all this unhealthy, violent stuff? I sought out doctors through health food stores and communities that didn’t believe in medications for a social and family problem. That way no controlling, pill-pushing medical doctor had authority over me.

New Data on the Adverse Effects of Meditation and Mindfulness

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

Psychosocially Oriented Psychologists Struggle Against the Medical Model

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Interviews with psychosocially oriented psychologists demonstrate their experiences of discomfort with the hegemony of the medical model in their place of work and the conflicts that arise when they attempt to provide alternatives.

A Blueprint for an ‘Ecosocial’ Person-Centered Psychiatry

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

Back in the Dark House Again: The Recurrent Nature of Clinical Depression

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Eighteen years ago, in the fall of 1996, I plunged into a major depression that almost killed me. Over the next eighteen years I took what I had learned in my healing and put together a mental health recovery program which I taught through my books, support groups and long distance telephone coaching. In the process, I counseled many people who were in the same desperate straights that I had been in. I shared with them what I had learned through my ordeal---that if you set the intention to heal, reach out for support, and use a combination of mutually supportive therapies to treat your symptoms, you will make it through this. And in the cases where people used these strategies and hung there, they eventually were able, like myself, to emerge from the hell of depression.

Linking Screen Time, Smartphones, and Stress Among Young Adults

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