Blogs

Using personal stories from my own family, my new booklet Engaging 'Madness' paints a clear picture of what an alternative healing journey outside the biomedical paradigm can look like.

People who can’t take care of themselves need support and protection, but guardianship provides neither. I know: I've lived it.

Your diagnosis should serve YOU. Not your parents, your doctors, your teachers, or the next door neighbor. We should be fighting for a future where the person being labeled has the ultimate say over how doctors and therapists view them.

Mental health professionals must be trained in the dynamics of addiction and abuse if they are to help survivors of childhood trauma.

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.

My stay at the hospital had no impact on the problem that led to my admission. But it did exacerbate other problems and change me in fundamental ways. I am a deformed product of that ‘cutting-edge facility’ and the ‘treatments’ I received there — social isolation, pills and shots, ice bath and ECT.

When I was training to be a child psychiatrist in the mid-1990s, childhood depression was considered to be rare, related to adversity, and generally unresponsive to pharmaceutical treatment. Since then much has changed. The psychiatrization of the pain and struggles involved in growing up has caused considerably more harm to young people than good. I believe the science is on my side in this conclusion.

This is a book about stories, urging families to recognize their own strengths and create new narratives on the path ahead.

Peter Gøtzsche discusses the results of the MTA study on ADHD drugs and the misleading statements textbooks make about ADHD treatment.

For many caregivers who assist their loved ones, the journey involves navigating the medical system and its many challenges. This time, the journey takes...

Withdrawal felt like: evil feeding on my soul, my spirit being tortured, not being able to feel love, constantly feeling like I was falling in a dark tunnel, and wanting to get out of my body.

My postpartum anxiety diagnosis became subsumed by an arbitrary diagnosis of depression. And this diagnosis has followed me for 30 years and counting.

In the largest newspaper in the world this week, one of the largest problems in the world was proposed as having a very simple solution. No, the answer to our suicide crisis among youth is not to encourage more teens to embrace more treatment. It’s to pursue multifaceted answers to a complex, multifaceted problem.

The voices were extraordinary; in a way, they were like ghosts. I could not see them, but only divine them by the turmoil they stirred up in Annie. They were not polite house ghosts who knew when to leave; they were ne’er-do-wells she could not get rid of. They were tormentors and torturers, testing the limits of her sanity, blackmailing her into submission.

Simple changes such as keeping a calm home environment, limiting media distractions and enrolling your child in sports will help a child who is inattentive or having problems focusing on his or her school work. They are also useful for any child and can even prevent inattentiveness in an ever-more-distracting world.

A mom describes her son's descent into the harms of psychiatry—and his way out. "It was really difficult to watch Matt decline. He had given up hope that he could get well."

Doctors, drug companies, and the news media have profited from skyrocketing rates of diagnosis and drugging for ADHD, and the law has created a perverse set of incentives for parents and children which favor the ADHD label.

Ultimately, the FDA Advisory Committee recommended approval of brexanolone by a 17-1 member vote. I was the only NO vote. I voted NO because as the sole Consumer Representative on the committee I didn’t believe the company had demonstrated that the potential benefits outweighed the potential for harm.

It takes a long time to recover from a psychotic episode, I understand now, and I wish someone had found a way, especially during those early years of her troubles, to give Rachel more space and time to find her own path to health.

In 1996, I suffered my first manic episode. My mother was convinced it had been caused by chemical exposure. But I wouldn’t hear it, and neither would my psychiatrists.

When people seeking help are relegated to “the Other,” how can they ever form a “therapeutic alliance”? Without collaboration, treatment devolves into coercion and oppression. We must change our language and relationships so new narratives can be born.

Surveillance exacerbates anxiety, destroys trust in relationships, and diverts money away from effective treatment.

I love being a psych nurse practitioner, and I never want to feel that my only role is pushing pills. The private practice I started is my effort to move away from this dysfunctional system.

Is every defiant child a freedom fighter? Of course not. Disrupting your fourth grade class is not the same as embarking on the underground railway. But is oppositional defiant disorder a label meant to subjugate and to serve the needs of the authorities? Yes, absolutely.

ADHD is a disaster area, in terms of the diagnosis, clinical research, and the harms inflicted on hundreds of millions of healthy people.