Non-drug Approaches

University of Toronto lecturer Bonnie Burstow discusses the key elements that distinguish the antipsychiatry perspective from mad, critical psychiatry, psych survivor and other perspectives...

Boston WBUR public radio intern Suzanne Jacobs goes on a journey to find out what “computational psychiatry” is, and has some difficulty determining if...

A review published by Romanian and German researchers in the Journal of Molecular Psychiatry suggests that many psychiatric conditions have strong links to Irritable...

Jack Bragen writes in the Berkeley Daily Planet about the impacts on people's minds of the war and violence going on around them. "Someone...

A five-year study involving 497 homeless people with mental health or addictions problems in Vancouver found that, when provided free apartments, most people “stabilized...

Today discusses a new study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that found people with low self-esteem don’t like it when...

Here in Portland I have been involved with a group called Rethinking Psychiatry, an organization that is working to critically examine the modern mental health system and to promote alternative options for helping people in emotional distress. This group works out of the Unitarian Church here, the largest one on the West Coast.  Sadly, I just heard news that the Unitarian Church no longer wants Rethinking Psychiatry to be affiliated with them and is effectively asking them to leave.

Nancy Remsen discusses in the Burlington Free Press the unexplained removal of executive director Linda Corey after 15 years representing Vermont Psychiatric Survivors. Corey...

A scholar who spent 12 years working with homeless people summarizes his perspectives on how homelessness relates to “mental illness” in the Georgia Straight....

As a trauma survivor growing up in various adolescent mental health systems, I never learned any useful self-care tools or practices. I was taught that my current coping skills (self-injury, suicidal behavior, illicit drug use) were unacceptable, but not given any ideas as to what to replace them with. No one seemed to want to know much about the early childhood traumas that were driving these behaviors. Instead, I collected an assortment of diagnoses. I was told that I would be forever dependent on mediated relationships with professionals, and an ever-changing combination of pills. The message was that my troubles were chemical in nature and largely beyond my control.

The search for animal analogues for mental illness continues to inadvertently show that much if not most of what is thought of as mental...

Examining the link between depression and loss of employment, a study by American researchers in the British Journal of Psychiatry found that cognitive therapy...

Mental disorders are spiritual emergencies, according to Malidoma Patrice Somé in “What a Shaman Sees in a Mental Hospital” published in Earth. We are...

In a review of 852 trials of pharmacotherapies and psychotherapies for major psychiatric disorders, involving 137,126 patients, an international team of researchers found that...

Noting that "childhood adversity is gaining increasing attention as a plausible etiological factor in the development of psychotic disorders," researchers from Johns Hopkins, Aarhus...

My heart envisions a future of grassroots community-based, free, accessible, welcoming, non-judgmental and safe spaces for young people in the middle of the hurricane of adolescence....They will be spaces facilitated by those of us who’ve reclaimed what it means to be human.

My mother was once a bright, creative, beautiful young woman, a promising artist and a poet, who was captivated by the hippie movement. She was a creative bohemian artist, defying the conventions of our middle-class Jewish Midwestern family, which had carried a tradition of holding emotions inside and acting stoic. One day, soon after my grandparents’ divorce, she left. She hitched a ride to California, and from that point on, was never the same. The police picked her up on a park bench in Arizona, and she was committed for the first time at age 18. She rotated in and out of mental hospitals, the streets, and jail until her death.

Sometimes I get so sick of the lies of biological psychiatry that I must speak out. At these moments I find silence to be a kind of emotional death: a death of my spirit, a death of my critical faculties, a death of my courage. I speak out because I am alive and I wish to align with life.

When Doug Turkington, a UK psychiatrist, first announced to his colleagues that he wanted to help people with psychotic experiences by talking to them, he was told by some that this would just make them worse, and by others that this would be a risk to his own mental health, and would probably cause him to become psychotic! Fortunately, he didn’t believe either group, and in the following decades he went on to be a leading researcher and educator about talking to people within the method called CBT for psychosis.

On May 16, 2014, I retired from a 35-year career as a professor of clinical psychology at Miami University. As a part of my retirement celebration, I gave a Final Lecture to my Department. These Final Lectures give retiring faculty members the opportunity to talk about anything they think is important for their colleagues and the attending students to hear. I focused on the changes I have witnessed in the profession of clinical psychology over my career; changes that were not for the better.

The New York Times Profiles Bessel van der Kolk, and the controversial approaches to working with trauma, such as yoga and "tapping," that he...

Based on my experience both as a therapist and client in the mental health field, I have learned that when therapists or psychiatrists give you the following diagnoses all too often here is what they really mean:

Among the reasons for listening carefully to others, this article in Nature adds, "People's conscious awareness of their speech often comes after they've spoken,...

As we develop critical awareness about the mental health “treatments” that don’t work and that often make things much worse, the question inevitably comes up, what can those who want to be helpful be doing instead?

The authors of a recent study acknowledge that "social functioning deficits are a core component of schizophrenia spectrum disorders." [Emphasis added] With this in mind, it seems to me that the best and most parsimonious way to conceptualize the research finding is that children who have poor social skills will, in many cases, grow up to be adults with poor social skills. In particular, there seems to me no justification (other than psychiatric dogmatism) to conceptualize the matter in medical terms, and to impose a medical framework – "a marker of vulnerability" – on the data.