To Live and (Almost) Die in L.A.: A Survivor’s Tale
After 25 years of chronic emergency, 22 mental hospitalizations, a stint at a âcommunity mental health center,â 13 years in a "board & care," repeated withdrawals from addictions to legal drugs, and a 12-year marriage, I plan to live every last breath out as a survivor, an advocate, and an artist.
Lighting a Spark to Heal Trauma: An Interview with Jesse Zook Mann
An interview with Jesse Zook Mann of Mental Health Media about trauma, medication withdrawal, and the possibility for recovery. Jesse was severely harmed by psychiatry, but uses language that reaches people who identify with the mainstream paradigm of mental health and mental illness.
How Psychological Injuries Cause Physical IllnessâAnd How Therapy Can Heal It
How does experiencing physical abuse as an 8 year old shorten one's lifespan? How do insulting words turn into diabetes? Or sexual abuse trigger a heart attack 50 years in the future? Emotional wounds can damage DNA and produce a huge web of destructive effects, but therapy can turn the process around.
U.S. Politicians Now âTrauma InformedââShould We Be Hopeful?
It is good that the general public is finally hearing about the ACE Study, but I do not count on U.S. politicians to address the core implications of the ACE findingsâthe need to re-make U.S. society so as to (1) prevent preventable adverse childhood experiences, and (2) create a society in which healing from trauma can more easily occur.
Bipartisan “RISE from Trauma Act” Introduced to Address Childhood Trauma in America
The Resilience Investment, Support, and Expansion (RISE) From Trauma Act, legislation designed to increase support for children who have been exposed to Adverse Childhood Experiences, includes $50 million in funding for a âmental health in schoolsâ program. Exactly what these programs would entail remains unclear.
Adverse Childhood Experiences: When Will the Lessons of the ACE Study Inform Societal Care?
The ACE study tells of how adverse childhood experiences increase the risk of psychological and physical problems in adulthood. When will we start incorporating these findings into public health policy and medical care?
Invisible Trauma: The Children Left Behind When Parents Are Hospitalized
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.
Trauma Outside the Box: How the ‘Trauma-Informed’ Trend Falls Short
Becoming "trauma-informed" is often just a way to advance one's career and feel good about oneself while pretty much doing nothing different. Here's a glimpse into the ways in which mainstream services and trauma specialists are perpetuating harm while patting themselves on the back for being progressive and aware.
What Happened When I Went Off Meds and Onto Nutrients
I remember clearly thinking, âIâm done. Iâm not putting myself through this again.â I wasnât going to settle for the side effects of a marginally better than placebo treatment again. Here is a brief look into my rollercoaster journey of recovery, returning to work, having my trauma re-triggered, finding a way through, and finally living well.
Psychiatric Retraumatization: A Conversation About Trauma and Madness in Mental Health Services
As a clinical psychologist and someone who was herself âdiagnosedâ and âtreatedâ for âserious mental illness,â NoĂŤl Hunter has a unique vantage point to view the mental health profession. I spoke with her about her new book, which offers an insightful critique of mental healthâs diagnostic and treatment irrationalities.
The Forced Psychiatric Treatment of a Child
This is my story of forced psychiatric treatment as an eight-year-old girl, from my perspective as an adult mental health professional. Being held down kicking and screaming to be injected with a benzodiazepine is a human rights violation no child should endure for saying no to a pharmaceutical. In hindsight, when I reflect on that day, it feels like a form of child abuse.
Perspectives on âRealityâ from an Alternative Epistemology
Contemplating human existence with a different paradigm of thinking will open our minds to perceiving the profound human diversities rooted in race and culture, developmental experiences, gender identities, sexual orientations, trauma, hunger, or immigration status, to name but a few ways we are or become profoundly diverse as humans.
Minority Groups Found Less Likely to Get Mental Health Care
From California Healthline: Although people of color are much more likely to suffer from severe psychological distress, they are less likely to receive mental health...
Temperamentally Blessed
From Aeon: The finding that only one in five people avoid any kind of mental health problems or psychiatric diagnoses through their lives has prompted...
The Silence: The Legacy of Childhood Trauma
In this piece for The New Yorker, Junot Diaz reflects on the impact of his experience of childhood sexual abuse and the ways that therapy...
How Compassion Can Triumph Over Toxic Childhood Trauma
From Medical Xpress: New research findings suggest that when pregnant women who have experienced adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) feel supported by those around them, their...
Jeffrey Michael Friedman: Trauma and Forced Psychiatric Treatment
An interview with Jeffrey Michael Friedman, clinical social worker and activist in the psychiatric survivors movement who provides trauma-informed therapy to victims of abuse and violence, including those who have survived abuses within the mental health system.
Trauma, Memory, and Mental Health
In this episode of ABC Radio National's All In The Mind, Lynne Malcolm interviews three experts about the impact of trauma on our memory and mental health. One guest,...
Art and Images in Psychiatry
Between 2002 and 2014, JAMA Psychiatry published monthly essays by Dr. James C. Harris exploring the role of visual arts in representing emotional distress, trauma, life...
A Radically Different Perspective on Mental Health
In this blog, Phil Wilshire, Principal Social Worker for Avon and Wiltshire NHS Partnership Trust, shares how the new Power Threat Meaning Framework aligns...
Treating the Lifelong Harm of Childhood Trauma
From The New York Times: Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, who has emerged as one of the country's strongest voices calling for a national public health...
No Guns in Schools
The Society for Humanistic Psychology has released a statement by psychology faculty and students from the University of Massachusetts-Boston in opposition to the notion...
You’re Not Imagining It: Empathy Hurts
From WBUR: National tragedies such as the recent school shooting in Parkland, Florida can be traumatic even for those who were not directly affected. It is...
The Demographics of Childhood Trauma
From Pacific Standard: A new study records the prevalence of several different Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) as well as the demographic groups who are most likely to experience childhood trauma.
"The most prevalent...
A Different Mental Health Approach Could Have Saved My Mother
In this piece for The Independent, Nick Webb tells the story of his mother's suicide and explains how a more trauma-informed, community-oriented approach to mental...