Rethinking Psychiatry/Medical Model

Attempting to locate the mechanisms of psychiatric disorder is a step in the wrong direction and fails to challenge potentially unjust social practices.

A new article, published in The Arts in Psychotherapy, describes the ways art therapy and mindfulness have benefitted refugees and asylum seekers in Hong Kong.

A new study demonstrates how the choice of statistical techniques when examining data plays a large role in scientific outcomes.

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

The first ever population-level study of the brain-gut connection in humans finds evidence for a link between gut bacteria and mental health.

New research suggests that treatable metabolic abnormalities underlie some treatment-resistant cases of depression—and treating the metabolic condition has the possibility of dramatically reducing depressive symptoms

The candidate-gene approach to depression goes unsupported and is likely based on bad science, new research finds.

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

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

New study finds that antidepressants may negatively impact recovery after psychiatric hospitalization.

MIA’s Micah Ingle interviews Mary Watkins about reorienting psychology toward liberation and social justice.

Seven years ago, I completed a six-year process of withdrawing from six psychiatric drugs. That process was the impetus to start speaking up about what is happening in psychiatry with far too many of us being gravely harmed.

‘Diagnosing’ someone with a devastating label such as ‘schizophrenia’ or ‘personality disorder’ is one of the most damaging things one human being can do to another. Re-defining someone’s reality for them is the most insidious and the most devastating form of power we can use. It may be done with the best of intentions, but it is wrong - scientifically, professionally, and ethically. The DSM debate presents us with a unique opportunity to put some of this right, by working with service users towards a more helpful understanding of how and why they come to experience extreme forms of emotional distress.

Amid calls for a retraction, Lancet Psychiatry publishes articles criticizing the original finding and a response from the authors.

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...

A review of mental health anti-stigma campaigns finds psychosocial models are effective in reducing stigma, while biogenetic models often worsen attitudes.

A special issue explores the connection between poverty, mental health, and psychotherapy.

Researchers interviewed people who were given medical advice to discontinue antidepressants.

Derek Summerfield, consultant psychiatrist at South London and Maudsley National Health Service Foundation Trust, challenges the assumption that Western depression is a universal condition.

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

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

I believe that an Intensive Psychotherapy can lead to healing and, often, a cure of psychotic states. By cure I mean the cessation of delusions and hallucinations, and a gradual titration off of antipsychotic medication, with the cure lasting—even without continuing psychotherapy.

A new study examines the role parent borderline pathology plays in the perpetuation of childhood maltreatment.

New research questions whether the diagnosis of ADHD even meets the criteria for a disorder, as set out in the manuals used by the medical and psychiatric fields.

Are White Americans’ poor mental health outcomes caused by Whiteness?