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I believe that one of the underlying reasons it is difficult to move through the obstacles to fully embrace the CRPD (Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities) and fight for our rights, is that discrimination continues to affect us on many levels. We have accommodated in some ways to a system that hurts us - not just the mental health system but the legal system that supports these violent acts and the society that condones them. It can be painful to change, to shift gears, to move in different ways.

How, in a democratic society, do children become ethical and caring adults? They need a history of being cared about, taken seriously, and respected, which they can model and reciprocate. Today, the mental health profession has gone beyond behavioral technologies of control. It now diagnoses noncompliant toddlers with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, and pediatric bipolar disorder and attempts to control them with heavily sedating drugs. While Big Pharma directly profits from drug prescribing, the entire corporatocracy benefits from the mental health profession’s legitimization of conditioning and controlling.

It’s stunning what a quarter milligram of a benzodiazepine can do to the body. I’ve been detoxing off a high dose of benzodiazepines since September of 2011. The first few months were a failure. But this past May, I found my expert and thought I had the formula. Things were going well for detoxing off a substance many deem more addictive that heroin. That is, I realized, until they weren’t.

All power structures throughout history have sought to use groups of people, especially among so-called professionals, who will control the population from rebelling against injustices. Power structures have used clergy—that’s why clergy who cared about social justice and who were embarrassed by their profession created “liberation theology.” Power structures have certainly used police and armies, as has been done throughout American history to try to break the U.S. labor movement. And the U.S. power structure now uses mental health professionals to manipulate and medicate people to adapt and adjust and thereby maintain the status quo, regardless of how insane the status quo has become.

I have almost four months to go until I am done with the little pills. After that, I’m told it will take two to nine months until my brain will regulate, until I will be able to eat normally, to stand without shivering, to hold my children without fear of falling. I will make it. But I am here to state the obvious: Benzodiazepines are dangerous. We need more research. We need to know that an invisible epidemic is in our midst and there is much that can be done.

Both addiction and “mental illness” are far more prevalent where there is poverty, patriarchy, and other forms of mental and physical violence; all this creates fertile ground for various forms of trauma experiences on a daily basis. Addiction and extreme states of psychological distress will never be fully eradicated, or even humanely treated on a broad scale, until the material conditions from which they have emerged are transformed in a truly revolutionary way.

The conventional wisdom is that antidepressant medications are effective and safe. However, the scientific literature shows that the conventional wisdom is flawed. While all prescription medications have side effects, antidepressant medications appear to do more harm than good as treatments for depression.

Millions of people believe that psychiatric medications have saved their lives, while millions of others report that their psychiatric medications were unhelpful or made...

Readers on this site have wondered how the notion of a "chemical imbalance" could have been accepted by so many when the research did not actually support the concept. A recent paper from the Treatment Advocacy Center that summarizes studies of anosognosia in psychosis gives some clue as to how this type of thinking becomes entrenched and accepted.

When I was young I believed the world spoke to me.  Lightning split across the sky to the pulse of my thoughts.  Rings around...

In Medicine there’s a saying “if you hear hoofbeats, don’t look for zebras.” It’s a reference to the wisdom of looking for the most likely explanations when making a diagnosis rather than looking for those that are rare and unusual. Hoofbeats are of course more likely to be the common horse than the rare zebra. My encounters with New Zealand’s pharmacovigilance system over the past four years have been akin to a safari, where I have witnessed scientists involved in pharmacovigilance and medicines regulators wildly hunting zebras while a rather large and obvious horse was standing on their toes.

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.

The Harm Reduction Guide to Coming Off Psychiatric Drugs, written by Will Hall and published by The Icarus Project and Freedom Center five years...

It’s time to speak about what is happening with the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in the United States. I have been...

What do we mean when we say someone has a mental illness? If we are to take the phrase literally, we mean that someone’s...

If we want to understand how our society may end up deluded about the merits of psychiatric medications, we can look at the research...

Last week, the Wall Street Journal has an article titled The Medication Generation by Katherine Sharpe which questioned the fact that a large number of teenagers are...

The topic of this article is Seroquel withdrawal: the process of withdrawal and the consequences of having taken this particular chemical for over ten...

I am a psychiatrist who believes that involuntary treatment is rarely effective in the long run but I am also a psychiatrist who sometimes forces people into hospitals against their will.

E. Fuller Torrey, through his Treatment Advocacy Center, is the country’s most prominent advocate for outpatient commitment laws, which typically force people with a...

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...

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

When I read recovery stories, I am sometimes challenged by the prospect of thinking about my life in linear terms, "Here are the years...

Today is the fourth anniversary of the suicide of my only child. Supporting someone dealing with the grief of losing a child to suicide can be challenging. For all those who have been hurt by well-intentioned comments or interventions, I want to offer the following suggestions to friends, family and helping professionals.

In November 2000, I anxiously stood before the gathered four hundred and fifty mental health professionals, administrators, peers and academicians and said, "Hi, I'm Michael Cornwall and I don't believe in mental illness!"