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As my readers know, I am a great fan of former APA President Jeffrey Lieberman, MD.  His regular articles on Psychiatric News were always helpful to the anti-psychiatry cause, and he will be greatly missed. But his successor, Paul Summergrad, MD, has recently posted his first presidential message, APA Poised to Take Advantage of Unique Time in History, and it is already clear that not much has changed.

A warm line is an alternative to a crisis line that is run by “peers,” generally those who have had their own experiences of trauma that they are willing to speak of and acknowledge. Unlike a crisis line, a warm line operator is unlikely to call the police or have someone locked up if they talk about suicidal or self-harming thoughts or behaviors. Most warm line operators have been through extreme challenges themselves and are there primarily to listen.

Like you, I have experienced severe cognitive and emotional distress in my life. This distress was sufficient that I once received a psychiatric diagnosis of Major Depressive Disorder and Generalized Anxiety Disorder, though I imagine other diagnosis could have easily been applied as well. I know what panic attacks feel like. I know how it feels to experience a "dissociative episode" from the inside out. I know what it feels like to believe that you are going crazy. I know what it feels like to convulse in sobs so intensely that you tear muscles. I know what it feels like to want to die.

In the last decade or so psychiatry has received a great deal of criticism.  The fundamental point of contention is psychiatry's insistence that an ever-increasing range of problems of thinking, feeling, and/or behaving are in fact illnesses that need to be aggressively treated with drugs, intracranial electric shocks, and other somatic interventions.  It is further contended, by those of us on this side of the debate, that this spurious medicalization of non-medical problems was not an innocent error, but rather was, and is, a self-serving and deliberate policy designed to expand psychiatric turf and to create an impression of psychiatry as a legitimate medical specialty.

Twenty years ago, I was invited to watch a young monk named Thupten Ngodrup go into a trance and ‘channel’ the State Oracle of Tibet (The Nechung Oracle). It took place in a small monastery next to the Dalai Lama’s residence in the little Himalayan town of Dharamsala, India. As the monks began to chant and beat their drums, Thupten’s eyes rolled back, his face flushed and he began to speak in a high-pitched voice. A few monks gathered around him and began writing down everything he said. After a few minutes, he collapsed and had to be carried from the room. At the time, I didn’t know what to think of what I had seen. Was this a dramatization?

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.

My name is Jaquelin Kalach. I am 19 years old and live in Mexico City. A friend, a teacher, and me created our association; Teenagers Against Psychiatric Drugs.

I find it to be a really difficult decision—some days more so than others—to do peer support in the traditional mental health system. I need to remind myself pretty often why I am doing this because it’s really, really hard! Here are the reasons I go to most often . . .

The disability community, including users and survivors of psychiatry, has sent a letter (drafted and circulated by WNUSP) to the UN Human Rights Committee urging that treaty monitoring body to follow the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in prohibiting all mental health detention. The signatories came from all regions of the world and include user/survivor organizations, disability organizations, other human rights organizations and individual experts. Since our letter is quite technical in pointing out the divergence of the Human Rights Committee's position from that of the CRPD, which is a higher standard of human rights protection, I would like to bring out some additional points that may be helpful in our advocacy.

A month ago, I published a critique of specific terminology of DSM-5.  Like countless others, I have serious concerns about the overpathologizing of normal behaviors that appears to be occurring over the past few decades.  The potential consequences of this trend have been widely articulated in many circles, and have raised a serious question, “What is normal?” But while this has been occurring in both psychiatric and lay arenas, another movement has been gaining significant support.  It is the idea that mental illness (or disease) is a fabrication, and as Sera Davidow quoted E. Fuller Torrey in her recent moving article, “Mental illness does not exist, and neither does mental health.”

As part of the Affordable Care Act, the federal government has made a commitment to integrate behavioral health with physical medicine. Physicians have saddled America with addiction to antidepressants, antipsychotics, and benzodiazpines. If the federal government decides that opiate addiction is ok, as they seem to have conceded, shouldn’t the question be “what is the cheapest and the safest opiate?” In Europe, heroin is an option right along with buprenorphine and methadone. It seems to me that the “back-door” legalization of opiates under the guise of “treatment” ought to at least be debated out in the open.

At the present time psychiatry, because of intense pressure from its critics, is retreating somewhat from the chemical imbalance theory. But instead of acknowledging that this notion was flawed, that they knew it was flawed, and that they promoted it for self-gain, they are claiming that they never really said it in the first place.

Rates of adverse outcomes, including premature death and violent crime, have increased among people with schizophrenia and related diagnoses since the 1970s when compared to...

Some things are floating around in my mind to try and make sense of. A big part of it is the connection of coercive/biopsychiatry to both race and gender politics. This is connected in my mind to the politics of healing in a larger sense than the singular healing any person might seek through therapy or personal search for wellness. It is a healing that is throughout the individual and society.

On April 19, 2014, The Lancet published an article titled Do we underestimate the benefits of antiddepressants?, by German psychiatrists Mazda Adli and Ulrich Hegerl. The authors argue that randomized controlled trials (RCT's), as currently conducted, systematically underestimate the benefits of antidepressants and overestimate the benefits of psychotherapy. But what's interesting is that in all the years that pharma-psychiatry was churning out its fraudulent, spurious and self-serving "findings," I never heard of a single complaint from psychiatry about these kinds of methodological issues.

A routine trip for lab work resulted in a this typical encounter, a lab technician who says "When I was hospitalized they told me I'd never amount to anything in life because I was bipolar and I'd need to stay on these drugs forever. When I wanted to come off, my doctor got angry at me and wouldn't support me, so I went off on my own . . . now I'm 37 and I'm the manager of this office, a medical technician and I'm getting a masters in psychology."

On May 16, the New York Times ran an article titled Thousands of Toddlers Are Medicated for A.D.H.D., Report Finds, Raising Worries, by Alan Schwarz.  Here is the opening sentence: "More than 10,000 American toddlers 2 or 3 years old are being medicated for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder outside established pediatric guidelines, according to data presented on Friday by an official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."

The authors of a recent study acknowledge that "social functioning deficits are a core component of schizophrenia spectrum disorders." [Emphasis added] With this in mind, it seems to me that the best and most parsimonious way to conceptualize the research finding is that children who have poor social skills will, in many cases, grow up to be adults with poor social skills. In particular, there seems to me no justification (other than psychiatric dogmatism) to conceptualize the matter in medical terms, and to impose a medical framework – "a marker of vulnerability" – on the data.

The controversy surrounding Justina Pelletier and her family has expanded its scope in recent months, and has now become a general public scrutiny of Massachusetts’s Department of Children and Families. I think there’s a very real risk of confusing some issues here. Every state in the US has a social services department, one of whose statutory responsibilities is to investigate reports of abuse and/or neglect. The system isn’t perfect. But this I do know: the spotlight has been taken off psychiatry. This is critical, because without the “diagnosis” of somatic symptom disorder and the subsequent allegation of medical child abuse, none of what’s happened to Justina and her parents could even have gotten off the ground.

I recently had the great pleasure of hosting a Hearing Voices workshop with Ron Coleman and Karen Taylor. The response was overwhelmingly positive. Many people described this as one of the best trainings they had ever attended. Ron's message is inherently uplifting - after all this internationally known educator was once a mental patient given a poor prognosis. But in addition, they offered pragmatic suggestions for how to think about voices and talk to someone who is experiencing them.

As my readers know, I am a great fan of Jeffrey Lieberman, MD, President of the APA. In his capacity as president, Dr. Lieberman writes a regular bulletin in Psychiatric News. These literary and intellectual gems have been a wonderful source of inspiration to me in my efforts to draw attention to psychiatry's flaws, and I don't think it would be an exaggeration to say that in many respects, Dr. Lieberman has been one of our greatest allies.

My name is Leah Harris and I'm a survivor. I am a survivor of psychiatric abuse and trauma. My parents died largely as a result of terrible psychiatric practice. Psychiatric practice that took them when they were young adults and struggling with experiences they didn’t understand. Experiences that were labeled as schizophrenia. Bipolar disorder. My parents were turned from people into permanent patients. They suffered the indignities of forced treatment. Seclusion and restraint. Forced electroshock. Involuntary outpatient commitment. And a shocking amount of disabling heavy-duty psychiatric drugs. And they died young, from a combination of the toxic effects of overmedication, and broken spirits.

Your next move will be an amendment to another measure. Do not attempt. You've pulled bogus crap with this since the beginning. You've lied about task force recommendations. You've pulled suprise buttsex scheduling, when proponents somehow got the message, and opponents were left scrambling to get there. Twice. You basically filibustered us on Wednesday, which was also scheduled without notice.

In the last few years I’ve developed a sincere admiration for those youth workers who specialise in working with young people pushed out onto the edge of society. I’ve witnessed, first hand, the ease with which they can broach topics that would leave many of us feeling uncomfortable. The best of them can speak about sex, violence, drugs and exploitation in a real and pragmatic way that signals a deep acceptance and understanding of the dilemmas young people face – with no blame or judgement. This ability to transform the taboo into the ordinary is something I’ve tried to develop in my own work. Through Voice Collective, a project supporting children and young people who hear voices in London, I specialise in training youth workers to do the one thing that can push them far outside of their comfort zone – talking with young people about hearing voices.

I hadn’t seen this psychiatrist or any other now in several years. I chose to make this visit to the man who prescribed the drugs for my 6-year-long psychiatric drug withdrawal for several reasons. Upon reflection, I think the primary one was ritualistic. Something to mark the end of that phase of my life. A goodbye to psychiatry, concretized.