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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.

This is the headline of an editorial in the most recent edition of Current Psychiatry. It is written by a prominent psychiatric researcher. Read more on why I am not so comfortable with his suggested solution.

In the wake of the new study by Dutch researcher Lex Wunderink, it is time for psychiatry to do the right thing and acknowledge that, if it wants to do best by its patients, it must change its protocols for using antipsychotics. The current standard of care, which—in practice—involves continual use of antipsychotics for all patients diagnosed with a psychotic disorder, clearly reduces the opportunity for long-term functional recovery.

Fireworks and heated debate were expected by many when Robert Whitaker recently addressed a group at the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) annual convention in San Antonio, Texas. So why was Whitaker invited to the national NAMI convention and how did it turn out?

I got a call from a colleague – someone with whom I’ve worked fairly closely over these past six years. The problem was the typical reaction one can expect when you bring together people in clinical and a variety of other roles who have been indoctrinated to think that medication is the way, and you offer clear and direct challenges to their belief system. Many people (most, even) responded well to the workshop. Some did not.

If your government espouses freedom for all but abuses citizens of its own as well other countries, its pronouncements are pure propaganda. This article seeks to help readers make the connection between the public and secret behaviors of the U.S. government as it continues to oppress those individuals within its reach that occupy a politically marginalized status; including, of course, persons who are survivors and/or users of psychiatric services.

Users & Survivors in Academia (USA) is a support, advocacy, and resource-sharing group for graduate students (both master’s and doctoral) with psychiatric disabilities or current/past experience in the behavioral health system. USA started primarily for us to reach our peers across the country and engage in mutual support and advocacy around issues we face in higher education settings. Over the past year, USA has grown to 30 members in states across the country, and has quickly evolved into a forum to organize individual and systems advocacy, and support one another in self-advocacy in our own academic institutions.

When we look closely at the current mainstream diagnostic and support system for so-called mental disorders today, the utter absurdity of it quickly becomes apparent. We have a system composed of literally hundreds of discrete “mental disorders” (those listed in the DSM), all of which are believed to be the direct result of soon to be discovered brain diseases, in spite of the fact no reliable biomarkers have yet been found for any of them after a century of intense searching, a fact acknowledged just last month by the current designer-in-chief of this system himself.

Research by Andreasen et al. published in American Journal of Psychiatry in June of 2013 reported that the dosage of antipsychotic medication correlated with the reduction in the cortex volume; higher dosage was associated with greater reduction. In that same article, the authors suggested that, since they found brain shrinkage correlated with duration of relapse, curtailing or preventing the relapse would probably decrease damage. Their suggested mechanism for shortening the relapse process was to prescribe more drugs. Before advising fellow physicians to increase the dosage of antipsychotic drugs to prevent brain volume reduction, it is important to show the following: first, demonstrate that symptoms, in fact, reflect the occurrence of a damaging process; second, demonstrate that any treatment intervention actually targets the damaging process itself and not just the downstream symptoms of this process.

To respond to controversy and resistance developing in response to the recommendation of Special Rapporteur on Torture Juan E. Méndez for an absolute ban on nonconsensual psychiatric interventions, I suggested to use June 26, the International Day in Solidarity with Victims of Torture, to raise awareness and support for the recommendations. What started out way more ambitious became a relatively informal call put out over email lists, Facebook and with the help of the Mad In America website, to MIA bloggers.

My journey into the dark night of the soul was launched by an adverse reaction to the drug Effexor. Taking this medication triggered a maddening condition called Akathisia--a syndrome characterized by inner restlessness and agitation. My body was possessed by a chaotic, demonic force which led to my shaking, twitching and pacing back and forth across the room. The force of my symptoms was so great that I considered the possibility that I might be possessed by some malevolent demon. What made the situation even worse was that my experience was discounted by the psychiatric community.