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From The Atlantic: The youngest among us will bear the larger burdens of trauma and economic fallout from COVID-19.

When Mad in America was launched nearly a decade ago, Scottish psychiatric survivor and activist Chrys Muirhead was one of the first bloggers on our site.

So, thanks to everyone who has read and commented on my stories of reentry into the mental health system. I have now had eight nights of very good sleep and my mental health symptoms are back to the baseline. Baseline for me means I only get separated from consensus reality when a significant trauma occurs at the same time I'm having a pretty good sleep deficit. Usually I can manage it myself simply by being aggressive about handling — and increasing — the sleep. So this time I was unable to break that cycle and got some more drugs to help.

This 39-minute video by therapist and activist Will Hall provides some basic guidance for anyone considering reducing or coming off psychiatric medications and their...

One of the amazing things about my new life and new career is the people I have met. I have become part of a movement that is filled with heretics. I am constantly inspired by the people that have the courage to write in this and other forums. I am inspired by the people that protest and refuse to accept a broken paradigm.

Dreams have fascinated people from the beginning of time. People believe dreams foretell the future; that they have psychological meanings; that we commune with spirits and the dead; that they are visitations from ancestors; that dreams make prophesies and are filled with omens and auguries. It’s always important to keep in mind that dreams, and our lives, are a human story. Our psychiatric treatments must always appreciate our stories. We do not need destructive pharmaceuticals. We need to appreciate the full scope of the human story.

In its coverage of the impact of COVID on psychiatric hospitals, the media missed opportunities to challenge stereotypes and interrogate problems with current carceral approaches to mental health treatment.

Even projects and people that have the best intentions of listening still block people out. Basically, coalitions are based on mainstream funding sources and mainstream moderators, and that tend to override the ability to hear challenges to the status quo. If the funding source and the project management is mainstream, the project will draft back to the status quo no matter how well people intend to follow good service user input processes.

As the schizophrenia/psychosis recovery research continues to emerge, we discover increasing evidence that psychosis is not caused by a disease of the brain, but...

The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals yesterday rejected a lower court's dismissal of  Watson v. King-Vassel, saying that a jury is in fact sufficiently able...

From The BPS: The current debate in mental health poses a challenge to power, and as we know, few people or institutions will give up power voluntarily. Dr. Lucy Johnstone

I have recently read this book, and I think it would be extremely helpful for parents, teachers, and counselors who work with children in...

I have made the point many times that the DSM definition of a mental disorder can be accurately paraphrased as: any significant problem of thinking, feeling, and/or behaving. It is important to note that the APA's definition of a mental disorder/illness is entirely arbitrary, in that there is no objective reality to which it must conform. A mental disorder is what the APA says it is, and there is no way to argue that a particular problem is not a mental disorder, because there is no reality against which this kind of labeling can be checked.

An interview with Doctor Lee Coleman, psychiatrist and author of the 1984 book Reign of Error. Now retired, Lee devotes his time to public education that exposes the individual and public harms from today’s “mental health” industry.

The FDA recently approved lisdexamfetamine (LDF) for the treatment of the newly minted DSM-5 diagnosis of Binge Eating Disorder. This caused me some consternation and this blog will be as much about my reaction to this news as to the news itself.

From The Guardian: The UK's National Problem Gambling Clinic has observed growing numbers of patients who have developed a gambling addiction after starting to take aripiprazole.

On MIA Radio we interview Dr. Derek Summerfield, honorary senior lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, former Research Associate at the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford and consultant at Oxfam.

Are those diagnosed with “mental illness” more dangerous than other people? Or have we evolved to sense danger from anything that we believe to be different or "strange"?

The beginning of a New Year is always an occasion for looking back at past accomplishments (and failures), and to look ahead too, at what the New Year may bring. And as 2016 opens, it’s clear that MIA has reached a crossroads moment. We can look back and see many accomplishments, and we can look ahead and see many exciting opportunities. But we also have to confront a challenge: we need to figure out how to sustain our operations.

Justina Pelletier, who lived with her parents in Connecticut, had been diagnosed with mitochondrial disease, a rare and debilitating illness, and had been receiving treatment for this from Mark Korson, MD, Chief of Metabolism Services at Tufts Medical Center in Boston. In February of last year, Justina's parents took her to Boston Children's Hospital with flu-like symptoms. Dr. Korson had recommended an admission to Boston Children's so that Justina could be seen by Alex Flores, MD, a gastrointestinal specialist who had recently transferred from Tufts to BCH. But instead, Justina's care was taken over by the psychiatry department.

I'm old enough to remember a time when outpatient psychiatry was almost entirely a talking and listening profession. Depression was considered a fairly ordinary and understandable phenomenon – part of the human lot, so to speak - and remediation was conceptualized as being largely a matter of seeking support and solace from friends and loved ones, and of making positive changes in one's circumstances and lifestyle. In extreme cases, people did consult psychiatrists, but the purpose of these visits was to discuss issues and problems – not to obtain drugs.

Back in 2006, when my son Franklin was in his late twenties and living in a group home in the Boston area, he refused to take Clozaril any more because of the required bi-weekly blood draws. His doctor prescribed Zyprexa as a substitute, and Frank suddenly began to gain weight ... a lot of weight. Later, I would learn that UCLA psychiatrist Dr. William Wirshing had said of Zyprexa prior to its 1996 approval by the FDA: “It is just un-stinkin’-believable. It is the best drug for gaining weight I’ve ever seen.” The doctor indicated that taking ten milligrams of the medication was equivalent to ingesting 1,500 extra calories per day. My outrage knew no bounds.

Division 18 of the American Psychological Association (APA), Public Service Psychology, has put out an open call for articles for a special issue of...

What follows is my attempt to report on the Pre-Seminar program from the 17th International Conference on the Treatment of Psychosis.

More than a year on from the release of DSM-5, a Medscape survey found that just under half of clinicians had switched to using the new manual. Most non-users cited practical reasons, typically explaining that the health care system where they work has not yet changed over to the DSM-5. Many, however, said that they had concerns about the reliability of the DSM, which at least partially accounted for their non-use. Throughout the controversies that surrounded the development and launch of the DSM-5 reliability has been a contested issue: the APA has insisted that the DSM-5 is very reliable, others have expressed doubts. Here I reconsider the issues: What is reliability? Does it matter? What did the DSM-5 field trials show?