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Subtitled "Pain is an emotion," Scientific American's portrait of Dennis Rogers, whose uncanny feats of strength seem predicated on his anomalous relationship to pain...

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.

The Redhall Walled Garden provides a tiny glimpse into the future, as a potential alternative to psychiatric hospitals, halfway houses, and the other oppressive forms of treatment that comprises the current status quo in most countries around the world. We can all learn from this alternative approach, and we should popularize aspects of this program just as we do the Soteria House and the Open Dialogue model.

The Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, authoritative body that interprets this treaty, has now confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt that all mental health incarceration violates Article 14 of the CRPD. All governments should take notice, and incarcerated people and human rights defenders should take heart from this welcome development.

In a recent interview, Nancy Andreasen, former editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Psychiatry, reaffirmed her earlier findings that antipsychotics shrink brain tissue. "We spent a couple...

In March, the United Nations Human Rights Committee asked the U.S. to explain how it sees nonconsensual medication in psychiatric institutions as being compliant with Article 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which prohibits torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment (including nonconsensual medical and scientific experimentation). A group of grass roots survivor activists have sent a report on forced drugging in the U.S (along with an executive summary) to the Committee.

Three-and-a-half years ago I quit my career as a psychotherapist. I’d done it for ten years in New York City and had given it my all. It was a career that chose me, loudly, when I was 27 years old. I learned a huge amount from it and I believe I was helpful to a lot of people. It also represented a vital stage in my life. But then the time came to leave. That also came as a sort of revelation.

Sociologist Harold Garfinkel, in his landmark article "Conditions For a Successful Degradation Ceremony" wrote that "Degradation ceremonies are those concerned with the alteration of total...

Psychiatric Times is offering an online continuing medical education (CME) course designed to "present information on why a patient might decide to discontinue psychotropics...

While increasing numbers of Americans are being prescribed antidepressants, the Centers for Disease Control reports that suicide rates increased 28% from 1999 to 2010. Trained professionals remain unable to predict who is at risk. Their guess is as good as chance.

Researchers find that parents who are focused on their child's academic achievement are twice as likely to start the child on ADHD medications as...

Norman Doidge is a curious psychiatrist. He wanted to know how neuroplasticity could serve his practice and he sets out in his book, The Brain That Changes Itself, to interview and understand the work of leading neuroscientists who are using the natural neuroplasticity of the brain to heal everything from long-time post-injury paralysis to successfully managing OCD and anxiety.

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...

During the past 29 years I have been diagnosed with anxiety, depression, PTSD, Biploar II and complex PTSD. I have tried numerous drug combinations and have been through ECT several times. None of this helped me. My road to recovery started when I decided to rebel against conventional psychiatry.

Sometimes the best way to make real change is just to do the work. Sometimes the talk is the work and it can be hard to separate out the two. However, in a growing number of instances, it’s hard to miss the futility of the talking and how tied up we can get in our own virtual war of words. Stepping away can be liberating. Sometimes, while everyone else is wrapped up in the talking, you can get an awful lot done.

Secret court proceedings against someone certainly justifies the feeling that people are out to get them. Expressing this sentiment is characterized as paranoia. If people felt they had a fair legal process they are likely to be less upset.

Chinese medicine offers one proven path to emotional balance and harmony for many people who struggle with anxiety or depression. Many people who receive treatment from a licensed acupuncturist experience significant benefit, and don’t need to take psychiatric drugs.

We have good reason to despair, to feel anguish, and pain. We have a planet that we are poisoning. We have people populating the planet who like to harm one another. We have families who, in their own pain and trauma, pass on that pain and trauma to their children. We face tragedies of all kinds just by being alive. Being human is DIFFICULT. It’s also the most amazing adventure and it can be very very painful to wake up to just how amazing and outrageous this life we’ve been given is. It’s no small task for any of us.

A randomized, controlled study by the Department of Pharmacology of Government Medical College in Bhavnagar, Gujarat, India found that in a study of 60...

The story of "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH" has a great deal of personal significance to me because it was the last book I can remember reading to my three young daughters before taking Prozac. These memories have taken on a newer and more relevant meaning since Gary Greenberg invoked the title of that children's book in his excellent article for the New Yorker, "The Rats of NIMH," following Thomas Insel's blog, "Transforming Diagnosis," in which for a brief moment, the director of the NIMH disavowed psychiatry's bible, the "DSM-5."

On August 1, Jeffrey Lieberman the current President of the American Psychiatric Association wrote an open letter to Psychiatry News asking whether is was time for psychiatry to "re-engage with pharma." Dr. Lieberman’s essay seems short on acknowledging any personal or collective responsibility for the problems that arose in our profession's interactions with the pharmaceutical industry.

In just two decades, pointing out the pseudoscience of the DSM has gone from being an “extremist slur of radical anti-psychiatrists” to a mainstream proposition from the former chairs of both the DSM-3 and DSM-4 taskforces and the director of NIMH. In addition to the pathologizing of normal behaviors, another explanation for the epidemic — the adverse effects of psychiatric medications — is also evolving from radical to mainstream, thanks primarily to the efforts of Robert Whitaker and his book Anatomy of an Epidemic. While diagnostic expansionism and Big Pharma certainly deserve a large share of the blame for this epidemic, there is another reason.

In these days with limited access to mental health facilities, and when in-patient or out patient treatment might be focused on invasive treatments and not on recovery, you may be tempted to "provide sanctuary" for a friend or family member who is experiencing serious mental health challenges. Many of you have probably already done this.

Since I spoke at NAMI’s national convention last month, the writer Pete Earley has invited people who listened to my talk to send him their reports of the event. Earley wrote a book titled Crazy, which was both about his son’s struggles with mental illness and the criminalization of the mentally ill, and in his book and other writings, he has told of his frustration with laws that prevented his son from being forcibly medicated. Yesterday, on his website, he published a letter from a mom who attended my talk with her adult son, and she told of how, after returning from the meeting, her son apparently abruptly stopped taking his medication and has now gone missing.

If you’ve been paying attention the last two years, you’ve seen the new DSM-5, as well as its predecessors, taking a beating from a variety of critics pre- and post-publication. Most have begun by noting the lack of construct validity of DSM’s diagnoses, dating from the landmark DSM-IIIR in 1987. Given the absence of scientific evidence to support their existence, these diagnoses were less likely to represent the neurobiological phenomena claimed by the DSMs’ several authors than to be products of their collective imaginations.