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John Foppes had been born with no arms, among a number of other serious congenital abnormalities.  Doctors questioned whether he would survive at all.  In his deeply motivating book, “What’s Your Excuse?  Making the Most Out of What You Have,” John describes his life of growing up with no arms into one of full independence, and his feelings of stigmatization and isolation even in the midst of support from others.  In the depths of his struggle, John also notes evident gratitude in what most perceived as a very unfair situation. 

If human beings were meant to be entirely stable entities, then “stabilizing” them would be an entirely good thing; a target for mental health treatment that all could agree on. But it’s way more complex than that: healthy humans are constantly moving and changing. They have a complex mix of stability and instability that is hard to pin down. All this relates to one of my favorite subjects, the intersection of creativity and madness.

There is this enormous reluctance among psychiatrists, even those who clearly have begun to see the light, to take a clear, unambiguous stand against harmful interventions. So often, they settle for the old face-saving caveat – "use caution." But how can one use caution in prescribing a drug for an age group in which it has been shown to lack effectiveness and has a very high incidence of serious adverse effects? Surely the cautious approach would be not to use these drugs at all, especially since it's virtually impossible to predict which individuals will suffer adverse outcomes, including death.

An Imaginary Conversation Between a World Health Organization Mental Health Provider and an Indigenous Scientist

Ever since I read Mad in America and later Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker, I have been wondering how to spread this knowledge to the masses and how to do this in a way that will make a difference to as many people as possible.

Research on volunteering has long found that those who help others have better physical health and psychological adjustment. And it’s not just that healthy individuals seek out ways to help others more; it is that in helping others that we reap the benefits of better well-being, too. Not only do we feel better but, for youth especially, there is a decrease in risk-taking behaviors, and more prosocial actions, especially with those outside of their family. But why is this the case?

Racially motivated invective and abuse are directed against people purely and simply on the basis of their skin color. Anti-psychiatry invective and abuse, however, are based on the activities of psychiatrists. For the past several decades, psychiatrists have been telling their clients, and the general public, and journalists, that virtually all significant problems of thinking, feeling, and/or behaving are caused by chemical imbalances in the brain. They have stated clearly and unambiguously that these putative imbalances constitute "real illnesses, just like diabetes," and that the imbalances are corrected by psychiatric drugs. So when we mental illness "deniers" point out that the various problems of thinking, feeling, and/or behaving listed in the DSM are not real illnesses, we are actually using the term illness in the same sense as is entailed in psychiatry's scandalously deceptive assertion.

Last year I visited the United States on a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship to explore ‘alternative routes to mental health recovery’ and to visit a range of peer-led, alternatives to the medical model, with the aim of using the knowledge gained to help develop alternatives in the UK. Looking back, all the organisations and services I visited came about because groups of people in the US decided they wanted something different to conventional mental health services, and then decided to work to make that dream a reality.

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?

As Michael Fontaine's recent piece illustrates, history has a great deal to teach us about the nature of this complex thing called madness and how we, as a society, might respond to it better. It is not only fascinating to know that modern debates about the nature of ‘mental illness’ are reflected in ancient teachings, we can learn much from seeing the issues aired in a radically different social and historical context.

When the American psychiatrist Thomas Szasz killed himself a year and a half ago at the age of 92, I thought there would be a global outpouring in psychiatric circles of sympathy or scorn. Instead, his death was largely met with silence, a silence as deafening as the one that attended the second half of his long, prolific, and polemical career. Szasz’ name didn’t show up at all in the APA program last year, and this presentation of mine is apparently the only one to mention him this year. This silent treatment has, ironically enough, and surely against his will, forced him to fulfill the ancient Epicurean ambition to live and die unnoticed.

The IT GETS BETTER collection (on Beyond Meds) is intended to help those who are currently dealing with the iatrogenic (medically caused) injury from psych meds. The intention is folks who are still suffering really badly might know that we can heal. The series will continue weekly for some time.

Michael Fontaine is Associate Professor of Classics and Associate Dean of the Faculty at Cornell University. His 2013 paper, On Being Sane in an Insane...

Note: This post originally appeared on August 18, 2014 on dxsummit.org. On August 5 and 6, 2014, a group of roughly twenty persons met in Washington, DC...

The FDA's black box warnings on antidepressants, which incidentally were long overdue, had a negative impact on pharma-psychiatry's image, and on their business, but had no negative impact on client welfare. Nevertheless, psychiatry continues to resist the reality that their sacred drugs do in fact cause harm, and that the FDA warnings were needed. For psychiatry, business and professional status routinely trump client welfare.

The idea that our more distressing emotions can best be understood as symptoms of physical illnesses is a pervasive, seductive but harmful myth. It means that our present approach to helping vulnerable people in acute emotional distress is severely hampered by old-fashioned, inhumane and fundamentally unscientific ideas about the nature and origins of mental health problems. We need wholesale and radical change in how we understand mental health problems and in how we design and commission mental health services.

What are warm lines? All warm lines are phone lines that can be called by anyone at any time who wants to talk about what is going on for them. Most warm lines are “peer run,” meaning the phones are answered and managed by people who have been through difficult times themselves and may still be experiencing challenging emotions and other types of suffering. Warm line operators, unlike therapists or some other hotline counselors, often share their own experiences to relate with, connect and comfort callers.

It’s not just in spiritual circles but also in psychiatric and mental health circles that fear and anxiety are too often medicated away instead of worked with. It’s not easy to work with it and a lot of professionals don’t know how to hold such space for such courageous facing of the dark parts of psyche and so many people don’t learn that it’s actually possible. For those of us who’ve come off psych drugs and faced severe psychiatric drug withdrawal syndrome it becomes a necessary and often heinously difficult initiation . . . Learning to embrace my experience and surrender to it was the way through for me.

Like millions, I am sitting with the fact that one of the funniest people to grace the planet has died by his own hand. Robin Williams’ death has hit people of my generation, Generation X, especially hard. After all, his face flashed often across our childhood screens. Mork and Mindy episodes were a source of solace for me as a little girl, as I bounced around between foster homes and family members' homes, while my single mother cycled in and out of the state mental hospital, fighting to survive. I could laugh and say “nanu, nanu - shazbot” and "KO" and do the silly hand sign and forget for just a little while about living a life I didn’t ask for.

There's an interesting article in Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics.  It's called The Efficacy of Antidepressants on Overall Well-Being and Self-Reported Depression Symptom Severity in Youth: A Meta-Analysis. The authors concluded: "Though limited by a small number of trials, our analyses suggest that antidepressants offer little to no benefit in improving overall well-being among depressed children and adolescents." In the Discussion section of the paper, they stated, "We found no evidence that antidepressants offer any sort of clinically meaningful benefit for youth on self-report measures of depression, quality of life, global mental health, or parent reports of autonomy."

What can we say about the DSM that hasn’t already been said? Quite a lot, actually. The manual (full title: the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), produced by the American Psychiatric Association, is incredibly powerful. It shapes research agendas, clinical practices, social care, economic decision-making and individual experiences internationally. As Rachel Cooper notes in her excellent new book, Diagnosing the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, changes to it impact ‘the lives of as many people as changes in the policies of most countries’ (p. 2). The DSM needs to be talked about.

On July 28, I published a post called Simon Says: Happiness Won't Cure Mental Illness.  The article was essentially a critique of a post written by British psychiatrist Simon Wessely, that essentially said that all psychiatric treatment alleviates suffering and makes people happier.  The falsity and self-serving aspect of this contention is glaringly obvious, and I drew attention to this. My essential point is this:  psychiatric drugs; illegal street drugs; alcohol and nicotine, all have in common that they confer a temporary good feeling.  That's why people use them.  But they also have in common that they are toxic substances, and if taken in sufficient quantity over a long enough period, they will inevitably cause organic damage.

What I find most compelling about the message of RECORD is its reclamation of pain, for the album makes clear that Dylan's is not the story of a journey to happiness and bliss and total peace of mind, but rather, one back to the truth of what it means to be human— pain, anguish, and all. It is an embracing of suffering, not a leaving behind of it, and this, too, has been my journey. This, I believe, is what psychiatric liberation is all about.

From time to time, I find myself feeling the urge to articulate my views and delineate them from people with whom I may be identified. Rightly or wrongly, I feel that way with this website. Although the goal is to have wide ranging goals there is nevertheless a distinct perspective represented here. I feel the urge to articulate where I part ways with some of the views expressed here. I do this in the spirit of discourse. I am not certain I am correct. I may someday change my mind. I am just expressing my perspective.

In the world of emergency medicine time is a critical resource. But Ryan McGarry, ER physician and stage IV lymphoma survivor, understands at the bone that idle minutes mean something very different to a patient. He recalls “waiting on news if the therapy is working . . . is there more disease that we didn’t know about, is it getting bigger . . . the clock was torture, watching that dial go around is torture.” McGarry horridly remembers what it’s like to wait on a simple, overdue dose of anti-nausea medication. He reflects, “You’re clearly at an advantage as a physician or provider at any level if you’ve been a patient. It’s just an unbeatable perspective.”