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An NBC online News article dated October 15, 2010, carried the noteworthy title New blood test may help detect schizophrenia. The article was written by Natasha Allen, a freelance medical journalist. The gist of the article is that there is a new blood test called VeriPsych which "researchers say" is 83% accurate in discriminating people who are "schizophrenic" from people who are not.

The next Town Hall in this Dialogical Series, which is being jointly convened by MIA, HOPEnDialogue, and Open Excellence, will be held on May 15th at noon Eastern U.S. time. It will feature a discussion between Russell Razzaque of London, Regina Bisikiewicz of Poland, Corinne Hendy of Nottingham, Rob Cotes of Atlanta, and Martijn Kole of Utrecht that begins with their experiences of fostering a dialogical perspective in systems of “mental health” care.

Editor's Note: To ensure the security of her job, the author has opted to use only her first name. My relationship with the mental health...

Yes, the boycott of the DSM-5 continues. I can’t tell you how many fewer DSMs have so far been purchased as a result of the boycott; and conversations I have had with professionals in New York’s public mental health system lead me to believe that the great majority continue to accept the validity of the biomedical model and the centrality of psychoactive medications in the treatment of persons caught up in the public system. Perhaps that’s the most important argument in support of the boycott’s continuation – we have so many more folks to reach.

From Pamela Wible MD: Physician suicide is a global public health crisis. In the U.S., more than one million Americans lose their doctors each year to suicide.

When people are “mad,” they are often insisting that certain things are so, and frequently seem unwilling or incapable of appreciating or learning from other perspectives. Yet when the supposedly “sane” mental health system approaches those who are mad, it typically does the same thing – it insists that its own view of what’s going on is correct, and seems incapable of appreciating or learning from others, whether they be the patient, the family, former users of services, or anyone who understands madness in a different way.

We are an unlikely duo, sharing secrets only known to insiders, the inmates and staff of Bader 5, Boston Children's Hospital's adolescent psychiatric unit. I am the nurse who blew the whistle that no one heard in 2010, she is the teenager who was imprisoned on Bader 5 for nine months in 2013. We met for the first time on this past Thanksgiving Day at Yale New Haven Children's Hospital, where she has been a *medical* patient for the past nine weeks.

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.

When we set out to restore GSK’s misreported Study 329 of paroxetine for adolescent depression under the RIAT initiative, we had no idea of the magnitude of the task we were undertaking. After almost a year, we were relieved to finally complete a draft and submit it to the BMJ, who had earlier indicated an interest in publishing our restoration. But that was the beginning of another year of peer review that we believed went beyond enhancing our paper and became rather an interrogation of our honesty and integrity. Frankly, we were offended that our work was subject to such checks when papers submitted by pharmaceutical companies with fraud convictions are not.

From David Healy/the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics: "The mission of the Cochrane Collaboration, established in 1993, was to systematically review medical evidence with a...

ProPublica offers an interactive tool that lets you search nursing home inspection reports for problems such as antipsychotic overprescribing.

Richard Bentall and David Pilgrim offer their critique of genetic theories of schizophrenia for the Conversation. "The high heritability estimates reported in earlier quantitative...

Thanks to Ginger Breggin for posting about Stephen Sheller's FDA Petition to Revoke the Pediatric Approval of Risperdal on her Facebook Page. Many of you know that Mr. Sheller recently settled a case against Johnson & Johnson over Risperdal causing breasts to grow in a young boy. What is not yet well-known is that on July 27, 2012, Mr. Sheller filed what is known as a "citizen's petition" to revoke the approval of Risperdal (risperidone), and its cousin Invega, for use on children and youth.

Almost 50 million prescriptions for antidepressants were issued in the U.K. in 2011, a rise of 9% over 2010. The increase is attributed, at...

It is important to tell parents the truth about what can and cannot be known about their child. In this way, people come to appreciate that labels and treatments offered by psychiatric professionals are far from being grounded in hard science.

What's needed at this time are not glib, inane rejoinders, but an honest scrutiny by psychiatrists of their fundamental assumptions and methods.

I kept telling her that Carsten Dahl is not Carson Dyle for the obvious reason the former doodles Danish bebop on the piano with a sort of...

An investigation found that many US hospital websites were more like advertising outlets than educational portals.

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...

Every year around this time, millions of people make their New Year’s resolutions. In many ways, our resolutions mirror the willful approach that is needed to overcome psychological conditions, even those of a severe nature. We must be cautious about agents which serve to dull us to our particular circumstances and state of mind, whether it be medications or otherwise.

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 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.

If you're on psychiatric drugs or you're a psychiatric survivor, chances are others told your story for you in their words. Like it or not (I hope you like it), you're going to have to retell your story in your own words, in your own way. If you choose to do this through blogging, social media, video or any other digital approaches, having your story read, seen and/or viewed by many could be very satisfying. You may not be ready to share it so publicly yet, but once you are, there are some tools to get your story out there to the masses.

From Ricochet: "'Personal individual solutions of therapists, of internalizing it, and that kind of stuff, is problematic,' explains McKay. 'Our own view is...

From WXYZ News: Three hospital current hospital employees are blowing the whistle on behavior that they say has put everyone inside the hospital at risk.