Psychiatric Drugs

“What I’d really like to do is stop everything,” I say. The reality is that psychiatrists are not the experts when it comes to getting people off psychiatric drugs.

I live a slow paced life. I meditate every morning, refuse to get a smart phone (yet), and it takes me generous amounts of time to do things. This isn't because I am “stupid” or slow to get things. Sometimes I wonder how others get so much done each day - yet the quality and vibration of what I do is unique. It needs time. How does this relate with psychiatric drugs? Psych drugs are rooted in impatience, urgency, emergency.

One of the first things I heard from Bob Whitaker when I joined Mad In America was this, "I get emails every single day from people asking if I know where they can get help coming off their medication, and I don't know what to tell them. We need to do something about this."Since then, I've received many messages with the same question myself, and rarely have I been able to offer concrete advice. Thankfully, that has changed! Today, we are pleased to announce the Mad In America directory of service providers featuring practitioners and programs who support withdrawal from psychiatric drugs, as well as other alternatives to the mainstream paradigm of care.

The world-wide first book about the issue of coming off psychiatric drugs. "Successful coming down from psychiatric drugs primarily addresses treated people who want...

"Recovery and Renewal is an essential guide for overcoming dependency and withdrawal from sleeping pills, other benzodiazepine tranquillisers and antidepressants. It is a useful, insightful...

Written by Peter Breggin, MD and David Cohen, PhD in 2007, this book seeks to "expose the shortcomings of psychiatric drugs and to guide...

This 39-minute video by therapist and activist Will Hall provides some basic guidance for anyone considering reducing or coming off psychiatric medications and their...

Evidence that antipsychotics cause brain shrinkage has been accumulating over the last few years, but the psychiatric research establishment is finding its own results difficult to swallow. A new paper by a group of American researchers once again tries to ‘blame the disease,’ a time-honoured tactic for diverting attention from the nasty and dangerous effects of some psychiatric treatments. People need to know about this research because it indicates that antipsychotics are not the innocuous substances that they have frequently been portrayed as. We still have no conclusive evidence that the disorders labeled as schizophrenia or psychosis are associated with any underlying abnormalities of the brain, but we do have strong evidence that the drugs we use to treat these conditions cause brain changes.

Peer support pioneer and MindFreedom board president Celia Brown discusses what it means to be a 'survivor of psychiatry' and the importance of human connection, and human rights in mental healthcare.

The Food and Drug Administration is investigating the deaths of two individuals who died three to four days after injections of "an appropriate dose"...

While a 2-year outcome study by Wunderink, et al. has been cited as evidence that guided discontinuation of antipsychotics for people whose psychosis has remitted results in twice as much “relapse,” a not-yet-published followup of that study, extending it to 7 years using a naturalistic followup, finds that the guided discontinuation group had twice the recovery rates, and no greater overall relapse rate (with a trend toward the medication group having more relapse.)

Pediatric Grand Rounds at University of Calgary from Mad in America on Vimeo. Video →

Researchers from Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute test the behavioral effects of SSRIs on Pavlovian fear conditioning in rats, and...

In a systematic literature review, researchers from Canada and Japan found that the antipsychotic aripiprazole (Abilify) was significantly and causally related to increased increased...

It has been a good time to bury controversy. With all eyes on Washington and the fallout from the publication of DSM-5, over here in England the Institute of Psychiatry has been discretely sending out invitations to a lecture. This is not a public lecture; it is by invitation only. And who is the esteemed guest? None other than Professor Charles Nemeroff M.D., Ph.D.

Rock climber, author, and MIA Blogger Matt Samet discusses his experience becoming addicted to, and subsequently coming off of, benzodiazepines.

In my most recent blog post, “The Unmedicated Life”, I attempted to answer a question I’m frequently asked by other survivors — “How did you get better from psychiatric medication damage/withdrawal?” But there is also a part two to the question that I didn’t address, which is, “How did you know when you were better?”

U.K. researchers find, in a systematic literature review and meta-analysis of medical (not only psychiatric) treatments that when bias is ruled out and effects...

If you haven't been labeled mentally ill by the American Psychiatric Association, you have to ask yourself what's wrong. Perhaps you were ahead of the game: you knew not to reveal yourself to them, you knew how to avoid them, you found other social support, and if so, a big congratulations. If not, what's wrong? Why have you conformed?

A 33-year controlled, prospective study conducted as a collaboration by researchers in New York, Mexico, and Verona, Italy found that men diagnosed with ADHD...

The Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care has reversed its 2005 recommendations, finding methodological flaws, possible bias, and uncertain generalizability in a review...

The New York Times reports that the "baffling" rise in suicide rates in the U.S. military is not correlated to deployment, as is often...

What makes the DSM so pernicious is that it is a cultural document whose influence transcends not only psychiatric practice but also the Western civilization from which it originates. Each revision of the DSM rescripts and reimagines how we make sense of our experiences, reinterprets what thoughts, feelings and behaviors are socially sanctioned, and ultimately what it means to be human.

Psych meds can not only put weight on regardless of how you otherwise care for yourself, they also tend to make people feel gravely lethargic and vaguely sick all the time. I could not exercise as I had before. Could not. It doesn't matter how much mental health professionals try to tell us that if we just exercised we'd be okay in the face of neurotoxic drugs that cause weight gain, because the fact is the drugs impede that capacity. This is not widely appreciated or understood and people on psych meds are again traumatized and made to feel guilty for something that is truly outside of their control as long as they are taking these medications.

Johnson & Johnson is negotiating with federal authorities over language that might be used in dozens of civil lawsuits regarding abnormal breast development and...