Popular

There is some hullabaloo going on about "prolonged grief disorder," AKA "complicated grief disorder." Yep, another grief-related 'mental illness.'  According to an NEJM blog the "condition is characterized by intense grief that lasts longer than would be expected according to social norms and that causes impairment in daily functioning." I think certain groups are at risk of - again - being diagnosed and "treated" for absolutely normal feelings and experiences after an excruciatingly painful and traumatic loss.

It's no secret that here in America, foster children are being prescribed psychiatric drugs, especially neuroleptics, as a means of controlling their behavior. A great deal has been said and written on the matter. Politicians have declared the practice deplorable. Children's advocacy groups have expressed concern, and, of course, those of us in the antipsychiatry movement have screamed till we're hoarse. But the problem persists.

Bertha Madras, professor of psychobiology at Harvard Medical School, has printed a critique listing 20 flaws to a recent study finding no differences in physical or mental health problems between users and non-users of marijuana.

It was the first time in my Klonopin journey it occurred to me the problem might not be inherent in me. The problem might actually be the Klonopin. Convinced my very life was at stake, I made the firm decision to get off the stuff once and for all.

What are the philosophical underpinnings for what constitutes evidence and how have quantitative approaches so effectively trumped qualitative approaches in applied psychiatry, psychology, and the like? Furthermore, is it possible that quantitative ways of studying human experience may actually promote constricted, myopic views that hurt or oppress human beings? And how does this contribute to a global biopharmaceutical research enterprise reframing the understandable reactions to oppression as being the deficiencies and impairments of its victims?

The Scottish Anthropologist Ioan Lewis, wrote the book Ecstatic Religion in 1971, in which he suggested a ‘shaman is not less than a psychiatrist, he is more.’   He claimed psychiatry was just one of the functions of the shaman, and he invited comparison between shamans and psychiatrists.  Some diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia appeared rather similar to the desired conditions of shamans in an altered state of consciousness.  Other terms used (and misused) for therapeutic practitioners included: native or traditional healer, medicine man, witch doctor, soul doctor, sorcerer, magician, spirit medium, exorcist, curer, diviner and diagnostician.

Preface: Failing in my efforts to get this article published for the general public, apparently only here can I talk about a “cool subculture...

A report on antidepressant consumption released on 18 February 2014 by the OECD shows huge increases in prescribing of the drugs across most countries. According to the report a key factor driving this increase is the expansion of the off label use of the drugs for a vastly increased number of indications. While this may not seem like news, I think it warrants some analysis because I think what we are seeing is something more complex than simple market expansion.

For those who actually believe that psychological problems are on the rise, serious inquiries must ensue. Many have rightly raised concerns about iatrogenic culprits, including drug-induced effects, but this too seems to fall short of accounting for the meteoric rise. Except for those forced to take psychiatric drugs, I would suggest that most seek out drugs in the hope of relieving iniquities caused by factors such as those I discuss below; unfortunately, this may not only lead to avoiding addressing the real issues, but may even lead to further complications of the drugs. Given this, I present five areas for further discussion, which I believe are causal agents for the mental health crisis.

The childhood and psychiatric abuse altered my neurological, hormonal and other bodily functions and it was difficult to say which abuse left what mark. The doctors used medication to fix the changes and the taking of prescription pills became a habit. I took pills to calm me, pills to sleep, and pills to make me happy. A few months after stopping all medications, I was a bundle of nerves and I opened the cupboard for a pill. Living on autopilot as I had been doing for so long had to stop. I switched gears from absentmindedly resorting to pills, to purposefully calming myself without using drugs by breathing the way the psychologist had taught me.

Those of us who are concerned about the state of the behavioral health service system would agree that voluntary, cost-effective services and supports that preclude the need for coerced or institutional treatment should be widely available. Peer respites may be one component of such a system.

As I was researching my book A Disease called Childhood: Why A.D.H.D. Became an American Epidemic, I came across an interesting pattern in the history of psychiatry. In my mind I made up a name for this pattern and called it “neo-Kraepelinian Regret,” named after the 19^th century German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin. Kraepelin was interested in classifying mental disorders by their symptoms so that psychiatrists would have a common language with which to communicate. His most famous contribution is his classification of the different forms of psychosis into manic depression, dementia praecox (which later became known as schizophrenia), and paranoia.

The controversy surrounding Justina Pelletier and her family has expanded its scope in recent months, and has now become a general public scrutiny of Massachusetts’s Department of Children and Families. I think there’s a very real risk of confusing some issues here. Every state in the US has a social services department, one of whose statutory responsibilities is to investigate reports of abuse and/or neglect. The system isn’t perfect. But this I do know: the spotlight has been taken off psychiatry. This is critical, because without the “diagnosis” of somatic symptom disorder and the subsequent allegation of medical child abuse, none of what’s happened to Justina and her parents could even have gotten off the ground.

With great regularity, I receive emails from people—“patients,” family members, and mental health workers—who are frustrated by this fact: the psychiatrists they meet, and the larger psychiatric community, are simply not aware of research that questions the merits of psychiatric medications. Many providers, for instance, do not know of Martin Harrow’s long-term study of schizophrenia outcomes. We at Mad in America started Mad in America Continuing Education to produce online courses that will fill in this knowledge gap. And now that we have our first courses up, we need your help.

For the past several years whenever a critical essay has come along examining the work of Irving Kirsch and his colleagues I have made an effort to examine the validity of the proposed arguments. Kirsch and his colleagues used the Freedom of Information Act to gain access to the unpublished trials of antidepressants and then pooled the clinical trial data – both published and unpublished ─ and analyzed it as a single data set. It is common for pharmaceutical companies to only publish those studies that find their products effective, and to withhold the negative studies, making it difficult to reach accurate conclusions by examining only the published data. Kirsch and his colleagues have reported that in the company sponsored clinical trials, the SSRIs only marginally outperform placebo, with the difference being statistically different but not clinically significant.

When I turned on NPR recently and heard the tail-end of an interview with a psychiatrist and former American Psychiatric Association president about his new book — Shrinks: The Untold Story of Psychiatry — my first thought (will I ever learn?) was a hopeful one: "At last, someone high up in that power structure is telling the truth!" As I listened, though, I heard the author, Jeffery Lieberman, state that psychiatry is a medical discipline just like other medical disciplines, and I began to suspect that my first thought was wrong.

My son is dead. He hanged himself at 17 but meh… whatever… that’s yesterday’s news and I’m totally over it now. I don’t long for...

Recent years have seen an influx of numerous studies providing an undeniable link between childhood/ chronic trauma and psychotic states. Although many researchers (i.e., Richard Bentall, Anthony Morrison, John Read) have been publishing and speaking at events around the world discussing the implications of this link, they are still largely ignored by mainstream practitioners, researchers, and even those with lived experience. While this may be partially due to an understandable (but not necessarily defensible) tendency to deny the existence of trauma, in general, there are also certainly many political, ideological, and financial reasons for this as well.

Since the 1980s, a type of psychotherapy called Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) has become dominant. Like it or loathe it, CBT is now so ubiquitous it is often the only talking therapy available in both public and voluntary health settings. It is increasingly spoken about in the media and in living rooms across the country. Yet when we speak about CBT, what are we talking of? For CBT only exists - as we will see - as a political convenience.

In 2010, Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica published a study by Göran Isacsson et al.  The paper was titled Antidepressant medication prevents suicide in depression. It's a complicated article, with some tenuous logic, but, in any event, it's all moot, because the article was retracted by the authors and by Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica about sixteen months after publication.  The retraction had been requested by the authors because of "… unintentional errors in the analysis of the data …"

When my son was born six years ago, the word “disabled” was suddenly all around me. It came from everywhere – the nurses, the doctors, the physical and occupational therapists, friends and family. I remember looking into his ice blue eyes and so marveling at the lines of white that extended so symmetrically from his irises that I began calling him Star Boy. I felt a new mother’s sense of protection. The label surrounding my Star Boy was a smoke so thick I felt I could barely breathe.

Before Michael Pollan gained well-deserved respect and influence authoring five bestselling books about food, he got my attention in the late 1990s writing about American illegal-legal psychotropic drug hypocrisy. Then he stopped writing about it. If he had continued his assault on American drug hypocrisy, he likely would have been attacked by many psychiatric drug users, mistaking his confronting this hypocrisy as challenging their decision to choose psychiatric drugs.

People have used psychoactive substances to dull and deaden pain, misery and suffering since time immemorial, but only recently, in the last few decades, have people been persuaded that what they are doing in this situation is rightly thought of as taking a remedy for an underlying disease. The spread of the use of prescription drugs has gone hand in hand with the increasing medicalization of everyday life, and a corresponding loss of the previous relationship that people had with psychoactive substances.

In a 1992 essay, British psychiatric genetic researcher Michael Owen wondered whether schizophrenia molecular genetic research would become the “graveyard of molecular geneticists.”1 Owen predicted that if major schizophrenia genes existed, they would be found within five years of that date. He was optimistic, believing that “talk of graveyards is premature.”2 Owen now believes that genes for schizophrenia and other disorders have been found, and was subsequently knighted for his work. Despite massively improved technology, however, decades of molecular genetic gene finding attempts have failed to provide consistently replicated evidence of specific genes that play a role in causing the major psychiatric disorders.

‘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.