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...
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...
U.S. Politicians Now “Trauma Informed”—Should 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 findings—the 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.
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 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.
How Medical Professionals Have Enabled Torture
From Boston University School of Public Health: A new journal article in the American Journal of Public Health evaluates the similarities between the use of medical...
The Perspective of the Outside
From Red Wedge: Mark Fisher, an author and scholar known for analyzing mental health under neoliberal capitalism, took his own life this past January. His...
How Psychological Injuries Cause Physical Illness—And 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.
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...
Badiou, the Event, and Psychiatry, Part 2
In the second part of a two-part series on philosophy and psychiatry, Vincenzo Di Nicola describes an alternative model of psychiatry that rejects some of...
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.
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.
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 “community mental health center,” 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.
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...
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...
Interview With Black Lives Matter Cofounder Patrisse Khan-Cullors
In this interview for Vice, Black Lives Matter cofounder Patrisse Khan-Cullors discusses her efforts to fight for the civil rights of marginalized communities and to speak...
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...
What New Zealand’s “Unfortunate Experiment” Can Teach Us
From the Boston Review: In his new book Doctors in Denial: The Forgotten Women in the "Unfortunate Experiment," Ronald W. Jones chronicles the history of New...
Drop the Stigmatizing Term “Schizophrenia”
Dr. Brian Koehler is petitioning the American Psychiatric Association and the World Health Organization to drop the stigmatizing term "schizophrenia." Click here to sign the...
Conversion Therapy Ban Will Get a Vote in Palm Beach County
From the Sun Sentinel: Palm Beach County is drafting regulations prohibiting therapists from practicing conversion therapy to try to change a child's sexual orientation. Palm Beach...
Psychiatrists Have Issued a Statement on Aversion Therapy
From BuzzFeed: The Royal College of Psychiatrists has issued a historic statement acknowledging the harm done to lesbian, gay, and bisexual people who were subjected to...
How Our Ancestors’ Trauma May Influence Who We Are
In this blog post, Dale M. Kushner explains how the field of epigenetics can illustrate the role of ancestral and transgenerational trauma in shaping our...
Selling Bad Therapy to Trauma Victims
From Psychology Today: The American Psychological Association has just issued guidelines for treating trauma that are backed by faulty science. The research behind the guidelines...
5 Ways to Address a Mental Health Crisis Without Calling 911
From The Body Is Not An Apology: For many people, calling the police during a mental health emergency can result in brutality. Here are five...
