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Integration of physical and "mental health" care has been a popular topic in psychiatric circles in recent years. I've never been entirely clear about the nature of this proposed integration of psychiatry with primary care, though from what I've gathered, it sounds like there will be a psychiatrist, or other mental health worker, attached to primary care practices, either in the flesh or via computer screens. What has always been crystal clear, however, is that the proposal would entail a huge expansion of the psychiatric net.

The controversy over “Study 329” on the effects of Paxil in teen depression has raised questions about the state of ALL medical research. I decided to look at the research for the most recent psychiatric drug approved by the FDA, a new antipsychotic called cariprazine or Vraylar.  I located twenty studies of Vraylar on www.ClinicalTrials.gov, the U.S. government-sponsored registry for clinical trials.  Three were still in process, and seventeen were completed.  Not one had shared its results on the government website, a supposedly mandatory step.

Prior use of benzodiazepines, such as Xanax, Librium, or Ativan, may increase the risk of treatment-resistant depression (TRD), according to a new study published in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease.

Benzodiazepines may be the most popular, widely used, and immediately effective of all the psychiatric drugs. At the same time they are perhaps one of the most dangerous, addictive, and abused mind-altering substances on the planet. Since the 1980’s psychiatry and their partners in the pharmaceutical industry have spent billions of dollars marketing these drugs and justifying their efficacy in the “treatment” of anxiety and insomnia. Psychiatry has been able to create a patient base of millions of people who are dependent on these drugs and are forced to remain “co-dependent” customers of psychiatrists and other medical doctors in order to procure them.

Recent calls for screening for a range of mental health problems point to an important recognition of the need to identify and address emotional suffering. Such screening offers an opportunity to decrease the stigma and shame that often accompany emotional pain. A powerful new documentary, The Dark Side of the Full Moon, calls attention to the under-recognition and under-treatment of postpartum depression. In one scene, a mother refers to resistance from doctors who lack resources to address positive screens as "absurd.” She is correct, if the alternative to screening is to look the other way in the face of women who are suffering.

I think it is indeed true that many people go to psychiatrists specifically to get drugs. This is because it is widely known that psychiatrists will prescribe psychiatric drugs readily. In fact, since about 1980 or so, they really don't do much of anything else. For most psychiatrists, a "patient" returning at regular intervals for "med-checks" and refills is the ideal scenario. Within the psychiatric community, there is, I think, a great deal more concern expressed about non-compliant "patients" than there is about those who adhere faithfully to the prescription and keep coming back for more.

'How to Touch a Hot Stove' (the centerpiece of what is being called 'The Hot Stove Project') is a film that professes to be about a new civil rights movement. It employs interview clips from a wide array of 'big names' on all sides of the 'mental health' world, in a purported effort to compare and contrast the many voices that lay claim to that concept. In fact, the filmmakers did a fairly good job of writing about a film that would surely have stood out in a sea of chemically imbalanced cinema. Unfortunately, the film they wrote about is not the film they made.

I am humbled to share with you my life’s journey, and more importantly to convey a recent experience that has transmuted everything, opening up a new frontier of being more fully alive. I am beginning to see the invisible; or should I say I am beginning to feel it, because it is an inner experience.

I just wanted to do a brief followup on my last blog post about my latest psychotic break adventure. I am a recent Psychonaut exploring the inner workings of the mind, and finding out what was my reality versus Consensus reality. I am starting to come out of the experience. It is like waking from a dream. Questioning one's self is a standard part of this process of coming back to consensus reality — at least for me. It's good to reconsider some of the conclusions I've come to in the last month or so, when some of my inputs may have not been a part of consensus reality. But I'm getting stronger.

I was recently surfing the internet and came across an Etsy ad selling a lobotomy tool set - hammer and orbitoclast. I was tempted to make the purchase and indulge my penchant for this historical “apparatus” especially given its rise as heroic therapeutic intervention for three decades. It was a mere $168.00. Although I didn’t buy the historical torture device, that ad left me with one penetrating realization: psychiatry is here to stay.

Lucy Costa is deputy executive director of a non-profit service user rights-based organization in Toronto, Canada. She works as an advocate promoting the rights...

Lucy Costa was born to Azorean parents who immigrated to Toronto, Canada in the early seventies. She is deputy executive director of a non-profit...

While the following list of political abuses of U.S. psychiatry and psychology begins with the infamous Project MKUltra and recent American Psychological Association torture scandal, this should not be taken to imply that these more sensational abuses are the more important than the everyday political abuse of U.S. psychiatry and psychology to stigmatize and disempower groups, enable dehumanizing institutions, compel compliance, marginalize dissent, depoliticize, and maintain the status quo.

Yesterday, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) released an editorial entitled “Confluence, Not Conflict of Interest: Name Change Necessary.” The authors argue that the phrase “conflict of interest is pejorative,” and a better term “would be confluence of interest, implying an alingnment of primary and secondary interests.”

In a Sunday newspaper in 2001, Mary read an article entitled ‘The Doctor, who won’t do Drugs.' It was written to mark the publication of a new book ‘Beyond Prozac’ by Limerick-based Dr. Terry Lynch. In our co-authored book, ‘Soul Survivor - A Personal Encounter with Psychiatry’, Mary describes her first meeting with Terry. “I was so inspired and encouraged by the article and the book that I wanted to thank him personally. I managed to locate his phone number and spoke to him for the first time. I subsequently met him a number of times and the enthusiasm and sincerity of the man were like a good tonic. From the word go, he believed in me as a survivor just as much as I believed in him as a professional and above all as a good thinker, someone who didn’t take things at face value and had the courage of his convictions. He listened to me, encouraged me and his great understanding of the psychiatric system greatly helped me."

On April 25, 2014, Jeffrey Lieberman, MD, then-President of the APA, announced that the association had engaged the services of Porter Novelli, a prestigious PR company based in Washington DC and currently operating in 60 different countries. I expressed the belief at the time that it would take a lot more than some PR embellishments to remediate the fundamental flaws in American psychiatry's concepts and practices. In the intervening year and a half, I've been watching the APA closely for any indications of fundamental change; any hint of critical self-appraisal; any suggestion of genuine reform or remediation. But I've seen nothing of this sort. It's still the same old APA, with its same old spurious diagnoses, and the same old assurances that their "treatments" are efficacious and safe, and that the great neurological insights are just around the corner.

Toppmøte is Norwegian for ‘summit,’ and Toppmøte2015 is the second of two very successful seminars bringing together professionals, academics, and policymakers with citizens, voters and users of services – under the aegis of the Norwegian ‘Nasjonalt senter for erfaringskompetanse innen psykisk helse’ or “National Centre for Knowledge through Experience in Mental Health.” That’s a rather wonderful organisation, funded by the Norwegian government, which ensures that the experience of people who have used mental health services is reflected in the commissioning, design, management and evaluation of those services.

This past Saturday, I was on my way back from Europe to Boston, and while on a stop in Iceland, I checked my email and was directed to a new blog by Ronald Pies in Psychiatric Times, in which he once again revisited the question of whether American psychiatry, and the American Psychiatric Association (APA), ever promoted the idea that chemical imbalances caused mental disorders. And just like when I read his 2011 writings on this subject, I found myself wondering what to make of his post. Why was he so intent on maintaining psychiatry’s “innocence?” And why did it matter?

It's no secret that at the present time, psychiatry is reeling under a barrage of scrutiny and criticism. Their long-standing contention that all significant problems of thinking, feeling, and/or behaving are brain illnesses "just like diabetes," which need to be "treated" with drugs and high-voltage electric shocks to the brain, has been thoroughly discredited. And yet they go on peddling their spurious, self-serving ideology and the products of their pharma partners. The great mystery in all of this is why has the mainstream media been so slow to pick up the story.

People hassle me for being anti-medication, and I always tell them I am NOT anti-medication; I am pro-fully-informed choice. But people like things black-and-white. They see me as being against medications, and so I'm telling you why medications may have saved my life yesterday, or at least saved me a whole bunch more trouble.

Kit Riley is an Australian artist and writer. Kit creates pervasive life/art projects about madness, work and language in an attempt to reimagine communicative...

I imagine that everybody on this side of the issue knows by now that the eminent psychiatrist Jeffrey Lieberman, MD, Chief Psychiatrist at Columbia, and past President of the APA, called Robert Whitaker "a menace to society." The grounds for Dr. Lieberman's vituperation were that Robert had dared to challenge some of psychiatry's most sacred tenets! But in all the furor, it was largely ignored that in the same interview Dr. Lieberman had said something else that warrants additional discussion.

Probiotics have certainly become quite the rage across the world for the treatment of all kinds of ailments from irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) to infectious diarrhoea to stress to low mood. Some might say that the enthusiasm has been rather slow to develop. Recently, the popular press has propagated the idea that probiotics are the next antidepressants.

A shock wave hit American psychology this past July when news surfaced in the New York Times that the American Psychological Association (APA) “engaged in activity that would constitute collusion with the Bush administration to promote, support or facilitate the use of "enhanced" interrogation techniques by the United States in the war on terror.” The APA quickly responded. At its annual convention held in Toronto the next month, the APA Council of Representatives did the right thing and voted to bar psychologists from participating in national security interrogations. There were lots of mea culpas, praise for the whistleblowers, and vows of future transparency and “never again.”

If you looked at photos of Luke Montagu in the grounds of Mapperton, his stunning ancestral manor, you might well envy his lot. Look closer and you’ll sense that his story has not always been one of wine and roses, for the next Lord Sandwich has spent most of the last seven years in hell, thanks to the interventions of drug-obsessed psychiatrists. Yet, though his experience was heartbreaking, often terrifying, it is now becoming a story full of hope and resilience, of grace and grit, for he has co-founded the Council for Evidence-based Psychiatry as his contribution to the information war on the false or misleading claims made about the benefits of psychotropic drugs.