Parent Resources

Researchers discuss the evidence that antipsychotic medications may cause brain atrophy in children, whose brains are still developing.

From KERA News: "These children are being repeatedly raped in [DFPS's] care," said Judge Janis Jack. "They’re being drugged in your care if they complain. If their behavior is not up to snuff, they’re getting psychotropic drugs. And that is not safe."

If you don't realize that you are autistic, your intellectual, sensory, social, and emotional differences are a mystery, even to you.

The FDA approval of the Monarch eTNS device is the latest form of psychiatric-inspired child abuse. If not stopped, it will afflict millions of children in unimaginably damaging ways. It has inspired us to form Stop the Psychiatric Abuse of Children (SPAC!) a new international advocacy organization.

A new study explores feelings of belongingness as a protective factor for childhood trauma and adult mental health outcomes.

When I was a young adult, I was misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder and placed on lithium. I am 61 years old now, living on the edge of end-stage kidney disease. If I could undo everything, by all means, I would not have taken this drug. It is not safe for anyone at any age.

Through all the years that I was a mental patient, my parents were excellent advocates who constantly questioned what the docs were doing, even though my own faith in psychiatry was unwavering.... Amazingly, what cured me was not some type of “treatment,” but getting away from drugs and therapy.

An interview with Drs. Peter Breggin and Michael Cornwall who discuss their new initiative, Stop the Psychiatric Abuse of Children (SPAC!). SPAC! was formed in response to the introduction of the Monarch eTNS, an electrical stimulation device worn on a child’s forehead at night that was fast-tracked by FDA with little testing.

Therapists are quick to refer to this pain I feel as a “fear of abandonment,” as if it is a figment of my mind and something not worth the time to attend to.

It would take decades before I recognized the trauma caused by repeatedly being separated from my mom when she was hospitalized. I grieved almost exactly the way children did who had lost a parent to death. Yet it was grief without closure because my mom was not dead, just... gone.

Disturbingly, our study and others reveal that the black box warning is now ignored in many countries, since antidepressant prescriptions for children are on the rise again. Despite increasing certainty that antidepressants are ineffective and likely cause suicidal behavior in young people, psychiatry continues to claim that they reduce suicide risk.

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

As a father whose 27-year-old son is trapped in the mental health system, I am painfully aware that I have been unable to protect him. At age 19, my son naively told his mother and his doctor that he was hearing voices, marking the beginning of a hellish nightmare which he is still unavoidably immersed in. I would like to explain my perspective on why this is the case.

At my job with a NAMI affiliate, I heard daily from people who looked at family members with “mental illness” as non-people, non-human, the “other.” In the office, it was no different. If NAMI had a tagline, it would be “Please be normal like us.”

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.

Bias and financial conflicts in antidepressant trials “contribute to systematic underestimation of risk in the published literature.”

The child psychiatrist talks about the importance of seeing the big picture and why parents shouldn't "be afraid if their kid is in distress."

Mark Horowitz and David Taylor provide advice on how to tell the difference between antidepressant withdrawal and depression relapse.

Emotional trauma is the type of wound that, if not processed and integrated, can become a void that expands to swallow not just the traumatized person but also their children and grandchildren.

Internal family systems therapy is a non-pathologizing method of working toward healing from trauma, a journey of returning to wholeness by reconnecting with ourselves.

The backlash against Dr. Yaakov Ophir, licensed clinical psychologist and promising scholar, began when he reported his findings about the scientific validity of ADHD.

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

To be a parent of a suicidal child is to be in a terrible position, where you hold in your hands the life most valuable to you and know that any slip of your hands may end that life. In the 1970s, my suicidality was treated nonmedically and I lived. In the 2000s, my daughter Martha’s suicidality was treated medically and she died.

The fact that we shame people for acting like they need attention (and for actually needing attention) is self-defeating and maddening, not to mention absurd. Living in a society that punishes people for having fundamental needs like attention is probably one of the reasons people have developed behaviors “just” to “get attention.”

If the Brackeen v. Halland case is successful, Native children are more likely to be placed with non-Native foster parents, and face a surge in psychiatric labeling and drugging.