Child Abuse, Mental Health and Mental Illness
Psychiatrists and medical doctors don’t ask who was hitting who and how often in your family. These questions would largely put them out of business and invalidate their industries. These questions would make a mockery of their many years of schooling and many prescription pad options. But these questions would also heal.
Perspectives on “Reality” 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.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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.
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.
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...
Childhood Maltreatment Drives Self-Injury
From Medscape: New research shows that individuals who were physically, sexually, or emotionally abused as children are more likely to engage in non-suicidal self-injury.
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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...
Links Between Benefits and Mental Ill-Health Could be Recorded
From Vox Political: In a new proposal in the medical journal The Lancet, Kate Allsopp and Peter Kinderman have called for mental health professionals to record psychosocial...
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...
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...
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...
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...
“If You Wanted to Kill Yourself, You Would Have Done It”
From The Independent: The notion of choice is increasingly being used to discourage suicidal people from seeking help. Many people's suicidal thoughts and actions are...
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.
We Still Buy the Lie That Chemical Imbalances Cause Depression
From Quartz: Despite its inaccuracy, the chemical imbalance theory of mental illness continues to persist in public consciousness. The prevalence of this myth may be...
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?
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...
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...
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.
