Why Does a Parent Medicate a Child? An Interview with My Mother

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When Brooke Siem was 15 years old, her father died. Her mother, Dee Barbash, sought help for her daughter that led to a prescription for a psychiatric drug. In this interview, they look back on that fateful decision.

Stealing My Mother From Me: The Horrors of Conservatorship

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My beloved mother was mistreated, cheated, abused mentally, and alienated from her family by her conservator and the courts.

I Secret Shopped #988 and Three Cop Cars Showed Up Outside My House

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Although it professes to divert calls away from carceral responses, #988 may actually be increasing involuntary interventions.

The Connection Cure: An Interview with Julia Hotz

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Julia Hotz is a solutions-focused journalist based in New York City. She is the author of the forthcoming book, The Connection Cure: The Prescriptive...

The Mad in the World Network: A Global Voice for Change

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Mad in Ireland is the newest Mad in America affiliate. The network of affiliate sites is becoming a global voice for change.

Carl Elliott, MD, PhD – Long Bio

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ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE Carl Elliott, MD, PhD, is Professor in the Center for Bioethics at the University of Minnesota, where he also has joint...
three identical strangers

“Three Identical Strangers” and the Nature-Nurture Debate

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Three Identical Strangers is a riveting film describing the story of identical triplets separated at six months of age and reunited in early adulthood. Their story provides no evidence in support of the genetic side of the nature-nurture debate, but it does supply some evidence in favor of the environment.
suicide attempter attempt survivor

Hegemonic Sanity and Suicide

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The “good” suicide attempt survivor wakes up in a hospital bed bathed in beautiful natural light, surrounded by the people who love them most, and they realize that their thinking was flawed and all those unsolvable problems can actually be solved if they are just compliant with medication and therapy. And then there's the “bad” suicide attempter who is angry that they lived, who challenges the status quo.
spiritual awakening

The Aggressive Suppression of Spiritual Awakening

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As they handed her hospital pajamas, similar to the orange prison suits you see on TV, she suddenly understood how little these people could help.

My Red October – An Army Veteran’s Crucible to Recovery

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After my VA mental health team prescribed Prozac, I began experiencing rapidly escalating behavioral changes. The drug was never considered as a potential cause.

Madness, Utopia and Revolt: An Interview With Sasha Warren

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Sasha Warren founded Of Unsound Mind to trace the histories of psychiatry and its connection to policing and prisons.

Remembering Bhargavi Davar: A Global Leader in the Struggle for Human Rights

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Bhargavi Davar was a global leader in the struggle for human rights, with her work as a psychiatric survivor activist simply one aspect of that work.

Starvation: What Does it Do to the Brain?

The Minnesota Starvation Experiment was conducted at the University of Minnesota during the Second World War. Prolonged semi-starvation produced significant increases in depression, hysteria and hypochondriasis, and most participants experienced periods of severe emotional distress and depression and grew increasingly irritable. It really should not be a surprise to this audience that the brain’s functioning is highly compromised when the body is being starved of food (and nutrients). What we wonder is whether eating a diet of primarily highly processed foods low in nutrients has similar effects.

I Am Carmen and I Have PSSD

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No one is prepared to have the ability to feel attraction or fall in love taken away from them. I am incapable of what makes humans human: emotions, emotional bonding.

The Dying of the Light: Norway’s “Medication-Free” Services for Psychotic Patients Are Fading Away

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Despite their successful outcomes, Norwegian non-coercive and medication-free programs are being threatened with closure.

Human

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God-like, they assured me they knew what was wrong with me and had the elixir. But their elixir was a poison.

Green Star Mother Demands Answers from VA Secretary

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If the Veterans Administration is sincere in wanting to reduce veteran suicides, the first place to start is to collect information following these deaths to try to better understand the causes.

Suicide in the Age of Prozac

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During the past twenty years, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and American psychiatry have adopted a "medicalized" approach to preventing suicide, claiming that antidepressants are protective against suicide. Yet, the suicide rate in the United States has increased 30% since 2000, a time of rising usage of antidepressants. A review of studies of the effects of mental health treatment and antidepressants on suicide reveals why this medicalized approach has not only failed, but pushed suicide rates higher.

Anders Sørensen – Tackling Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal Through Research and in Practice

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Anders Sørenson is a Danish clinical psychologist with a special interest in psychiatric drug withdrawal. He has undertaken research which assesses the state of guidance on psychiatric drug withdrawal and paid close attention to tapering methods with the aim of identifying approaches which might make withdrawal more tolerable for people.

The New York Times Is Now Engulfed in the STAR*D Scandal

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The New York Times published yet again the fraudulent result from the STAR*D trial. Will the mainstream media ever tell of this scandal?

Dismissing the “Human Experience”: College Students Feel Unseen by the Medical Model of Mental...

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In conversations with college students and recent graduates from across the country and around the world, they described feeling dismissed by views of mental health that narrow their experiences to individual medical problems.

Psychiatry, Fraud, and the Case for a Class-Action Lawsuit

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For decades, psychiatry committed medical fraud when it told the public that antidepressants fixed a chemical imbalance in the brain.

In Memoriam: Matt Stevenson

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MIA blogger Matt Stevenson, who was best known to the MIA community for his frequent—and insightful—comments on MIA posts, died last Thursday. He took his own life, at age 32. His last message was this: Don't let a psychiatric diagnosis rob you of your hope.

Q&A: How Can We See ADHD From Another Angle, and What Can We Do...

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We all want to help our kids or our students, and sometimes finding the right key to unlock a child’s gifts is a matter of time, patience, trial, and error.

Making Peer Counseling Radically Accessible

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I imagined a world in which anyone can hit a button on their phone and be connected with a compassionate and empathetic listener, 24/7. So in 2019, I founded Peer Collective. Today, there are 30 peer counselors on the platform offering 30-minute counseling sessions for just $14.