Non-drug Approaches

"Emodiversity," or living with a wide range of many different types of both very positive and very negative emotions, is strongly linked to overall...

The Guardian and other media outlets ran articles about two psychiatrists promoting "the use of hip-hop as an aid to the treatment of mental...

In my previous blog, “Back in the Dark House Again: The Recurrent Nature of Clinical Depression,” I reported on my recent relapse into depression that began this summer. As I have comtemplated the seriousness of my episode, the question has arisen, “Am I having a nervous breakdown?” Although I couldn't see it, there was a reason for hope — for a breakdown can be a precursor to a breakthrough.

Maria Popova provides some excerpts about music, madness and therapy from the new book, Joni Mitchell: In Her Own Words, from the iconic Canadian...

Mae Harden is interviewed by Philly.com about her years of attempting to medicate away the voices she was hearing in her head, while hiding...

Austin Community College adjunct professor and psychologist John Breeding has published a personal, reflective essay in SAGE Open about the work and influence of...

I was honored to both attend and participate in the recent Mad In America Film Festival. I was asked to join a panel of psychiatrists who were asked to respond to the themes and questions explored in the festival. What follows are a lightly edited version of my remarks.

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.

On Substance.com, Maia Szalavitz discusses her own experiences with addiction, and examines the research that suggests addiction is less a chronic disease of the...

On the Sri Lankan social media platform LankaWeb, medical doctor Ruwan M. Jayatunge recounts stories of difficult states of mind described in the ancient...

Boston.com has published an article about the Mad In America Film Festival, running through this weekend in Medford, Massachusetts. "Making people rethink psychiatry —...

Mad Matters, a Canadian collection of writings by psychiatric survivors, anti-psychiatry activists, academics (including MIA Blogger Bonnie Burstow) and others who take critical approaches...

What should the relational and emotional stance of the therapist be? Just who exactly is the therapist in relationship to the person coming to see the therapist? What is the therapist's job, exactly? What should the therapist's disposition be toward the person sitting across from them? What kinds of assumptions or presumed power come with the label therapist and are those assumptions harmful or helpful?

"Always appending disorder to the word bipolar is akin to always appending accident to the end of automobile. In other words, saying 'bipolar disorder'...

Technology journalist Shane Snow experiments with "Muse" for two weeks, a $300 high-tech headband that provides both relaxation exercises and real-time electroencephalogram readings of...

One-on-one Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is better than psychiatric medications or other common psychotherapeutic interventions for severe anxiety disorders in adults, according to a large...

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

Why do people readily accept the data showing that nutrients are good for our hearts, and for prevention and (now perhaps) treatment of cancer . . . but they find it so hard to accept the use of nutrients to make us feel better mentally?

An op-ed in The Advertiser begins with a quote from Carl Jung: “The foundation of mental illness is our unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.”...

Most US children and youth diagnosed with ADHD are taking stimulant medications, but less than one-quarter are receiving any amount of concurrent psychotherapy of...

Our culture promotes "fitting in" through "normality" as an ultimate ideal that all "disordered" people should strive to attain, and yet at the same...

With less than three weeks to go before the start of Alternatives 2014, I feel inspired to write about why the Alternatives conference is important to the c/s/x movement for social justice and why we at the National Mental Health Consumers’ Self-Help Clearinghouse feel honored to organize this year’s conference.

In gaming magazine Polygon, Liana Kerzner reviews video games that weren't designed as "therapy," but include primary characters who are struggling with deep psychological...

"It is unacceptable for this municipality to create a housing crisis and then reframe it as a mental health crisis," writes the Vancouver Area...

In his Scientific American blog, Scott Barry Kaufman discusses a study that provides new perspectives on the controversial question of the links between "mental...