Rethinking Psychiatry/Medical Model

In this piece for STAT, Shirley S. Wang discusses the Hearing Voices Network and its non-pathologizing, rights-affirming approach to hearing voices and alternative realities. "Many recovered...

The American Psychological Association is hosting a two and half day interdisciplinary summit on November 3rd through 5th entitled Global Approaches to Integrated Care: Translating Science And Best Practices Into Patient-Centered Health Care Delivery. The summit features presentations and discussions on social determinants of health, demographics, culture and health disparities, and patients’ perspectives, among others. It can be livestreamed here.

Long-term treatment with antipsychotic drugs is currently considered the standard treatment for patients diagnosed with ‘schizophrenia.’ A new study challenges this practice, however. The...

Use of antidepressants increased the risk of organ-specific malformations in women with depression

Psychotherapist Chantal Marie Gagnon voices her frustration with social media posts and stigma reduction ads that perpetuate the belief that all mental health issues...

The only way out of the epidemic of feeling-people-turned-medicated-psychiatric-patients is to rebrand and reframe feeling as a cultural collective. And I believe it starts with our messaging as parents and our orientation toward shadow elements like anger and sadness. We have to model a conscious relationship to our own dark parts, and we have to show our children what it looks like to move through these spaces. Feelings can be messy, wild, and sometimes ugly to our constrained sensibilities.

The bidirectional relationship between diet and nutrition and social, emotional, and educational factors among European youth.

Results of a large government-funded study call into question current drug heavy approaches to treating people diagnosed with schizophrenia. The study, which the New York Times called “by far the most rigorous trial to date conducted in the United States,” found that patients who received smaller doses of antipsychotic drugs with individual talk therapy, family training, and support for employment and education had a greater reduction in symptoms as well as increases in quality of life, and participation in work and school than those receiving the current standard of care.

In this piece for La Otra Psiquiatría, Fernando Colina describes his vision for a compassionate, non-pathologizing mental health system. Below is the full translation of his...

While I have lived just a few miles away from the Capitol for the last fifteen years, I have been unsure about getting involved in legislative advocacy. I’ve been intimidated by the complexity of the legislative process, and more inclined to leave it up to others who I perceive as having more experience than me. And honestly, I haven’t felt very hopeful about effecting change. My cynicism had turned to “learned helplessness.” And then along came a mental health bill so destructive, so regressive, that I had to step out of my uncomfortable comfort zone.

-The Future of Mental Health Movement has started a list of the 100 best books, and is requesting suggestions for others to add.

New data interpreted to suggest a hierarchical, dimensional system of mental disorders will aid future research efforts and improve mental health care.

A pathbreaking new study out of Finland suggests that early intervention programs for youth experiencing psychotic-like symptoms may see the greatest improvement when treatment works within the home rather than in a hospital setting. The research, to be published in next month’s issue of Psychiatry Research, found greater improvement in functioning, depression, and hopelessness among teens in a new need-adapted Family and Community oriented Integrative Treatment Model (FCTM) program.

Steven Morgan discusses his transformative journey from chronic "patient" to leading mental health advocate. Steven has been working in peer support and helping to create alternatives to traditional mental health services for the past decade...

When the American psychiatrist Thomas Szasz killed himself a year and a half ago at the age of 92, I thought there would be a global outpouring in psychiatric circles of sympathy or scorn. Instead, his death was largely met with silence, a silence as deafening as the one that attended the second half of his long, prolific, and polemical career. Szasz’ name didn’t show up at all in the APA program last year, and this presentation of mine is apparently the only one to mention him this year. This silent treatment has, ironically enough, and surely against his will, forced him to fulfill the ancient Epicurean ambition to live and die unnoticed.

The staff at Minneapolis’ Southside Village Boys and Girls Club are implementing  a specially targeted free interactive counseling toolkit designed by a team of volunteers...

We are profoundly social beings living not as isolated individuals but as integral members of interdependent social systems—our nuclear family system, and the broader social systems of extended family, peers, our community and the broader society. Therefore, psychosis and other forms of human distress often deemed “mental illness” are best seen not so much as something intrinsically “wrong” or “diseased” within the particular individual who is most exhibiting that distress, but rather as systemic problems that are merely being channeled through this individual.

From Mail & Guardian: Colonialism today is more entrenched in our society than it ever has been in the past, and traditional psychology and mental...

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.

Review finds that stigma around voice hearing is connected to isolation, secrecy, and poorer functioning.

A coalition of 35 health organizations expressed serious concerns that the NICE guideline for adult depression may cause clinical harm—they demand “full and proper” revisions.

A combination of exercise and meditation done twice a week over two months may reduce depression symptoms by 40 percent, according to a new study published open-access this month in Translational Psychiatry. Following the eight-week intervention, the student participants that had previously been diagnosed with major depressive disorder (MDD) reported significantly less symptoms and ruminative thoughts and students without any such diagnoses also showed remarkable improvements.

According to philosopher Erich Fromm, the more technologically and intellectually advanced a society becomes, the more the society risks collective insanity, subjecting itself to...

Brief psychodynamic and psychosocial interventions help maintain reduced depressive symptoms

A new study finds that mental health apps promote a one-dimensional view of mental health.