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I got to thinking. In my essay “The Reality Is In Our Heads,” I espoused a phenomenological view of the world in which human...

A team of Egyptian researchers found, in a sample of 74 outpatients, a relationship between trauma and first-episode schizophrenia, with a "mediating" role of...

Pharmalot has just posted a piece - 'Controversial FDA official, Tom Laughren, retires.' This is a must read for anyone with anything to do with mental health - both the post and the comments afterwards where some have posted that they still believe the Black Box warnings on antidepressants arose because of pressure from the Church of Scientology rather than in response to the data.The post will likely seem boring to many. But the comments won't - they seethe with anger.

It is not the responsibility of those exposed to demonstrate danger, it is the responsibility of pharmaceutical, commercial, and industrial companies to properly evaluate the long-term safety of such exposures, including an evaluation of the severe risks to a potentially genetically vulnerable minority. Only then can a governing body be in a position to sanction, condone, or even promote such chemicals.

Hope heals. Thousand of years of experience and, more recently, numerous hope studies, prove this to be true. Yet hope is still a 4-letter word in many mental health settings. How can we build a bridge to hope from hope-stealing physical and emotional pain, hopeless diagnoses and prognoses, and hope-numbing side effects?

The recent research scandals out of the University of Minnesota’s Department of Psychiatry may be alarming, but they are not new. Back in the 1990s, when the university was working its way towards a crippling probation by the National Institutes of Health (for yet another episode of misconduct (this time in the Department of Surgery), the Department of Psychiatry hosted two spectacular cases of research wrongdoing, both of which resulted in faculty members being disqualified from conducting research by the FDA.

This week, MIA highlighted a recently published study of the four most commonly prescribed neurolpetics. As noted in the post, the major outcome was that these drugs were not found to be effective or safe. This important study, co-authored by Dilip Jeste the current president of the American Psychiatric Association, is worth reviewing in greater detail.

(August, 1985) My first academic article, entitled, “Dissociation and Psychotic Symptoms” is published in The American Journal of Psychiatry. It was a case report of a young girl who experienced visions and voices. We thought that she had dissociative symptoms and we had taught her how to control these experiences through self hypnosis. In the same month, an article was published in another academic journal. This was entitled, “Treatment of Bulimia and Rapid-Cycling Bipolar Disorder with Sodium Valproate: A case Report .” We were describing the same young girl. Our treatments were concurrent. How could this be?

How and why the right to fresh air is continuously blocked by money, politics and ignorance. Plus, personal reflections on how nature heals.

It is more helpful to focus on what clients do well than what they are lacking. These are simple things, but it takes a lot of discipline for professionals to stay focused, stay simple, respect clients as the expert on their life and listen intensely for their strengths and resources.

Psychiatry’s desperate drive to legitimize itself as a profitable medical authority has resulted in a mass delusion so pervasive and destructive that it's put us on a path towards societal collapse. This is not an overstatement, in my opinion, as the statistics are mind-boggling— one in five Americans are on psychiatric drugs. One in five. By my calculations, this means that 62,913,200 people ingest mind-altering, body-altering, spirit-altering pills they believe to be “medications” on a daily basis.

"The last four years have seen a 90% increase in the number of serious adverse drug reports received by the Food and Drug Administration," according to a report by the Institute for Safe Medication Practices." Among them, a "signal" that Cymbalta causes "an array of problems such as crying, suicidal ideation, and anger, and other symptoms including effects on appetite and weight gain."

Neurochambers' Chris Chambers, a freshly-minted associate editor for journal Cortex, asks for comments on "the most important thing I have committed to this blog...

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.

"A drug that was never meant for kids was illegally marketed to kids," said a lawyer for the plaintiff in opening remarks for the...

An Op-Ed in Op-Ed News discusses the disconnect between concern about rising suicide rates in the general population (and the military) and awareness of...

What follows is my attempt to report on the Pre-Seminar program from the 17th International Conference on the Treatment of Psychosis.

1 Boring Old Man reflects on his work with children and adolescents, in which he directly observes the troubling effects of antidepressants, and the...

Thomas Szasz, relentless "critic of coercive psychiatry, the 'therapeutic state,' and the war on drugs," died at his home in Manlius, N.Y. over the...

In an interview with Pharmalot, former FDA associate chief counsel Arnie Friede discusses the impact of last month's $181 million Risperdal settlement on pharmaceuticals'...

I just learned that Dr. Martin Keller, principal investigator of the controversial Paxil study 329, has retired from his position as a professor of...

I have just attended the 17th International Conference on the Treatment of Psychosis in Tornio, Finland. I am full of thoughts and I keep trying to figure out how I will explain this meeting to others.

Beyond Prozac: Author, teacher, and mental health coach Douglas Bloch writes on using holistic tools and coping strategies to manage the symptoms of depression, anxiety...

1 Boring Old Man bores ever more deeply into the newly available raw data from GlaxoSmithKline's study of Paxil in children, finding that "if...

Brothers and sisters, I want to tell you a little movement history which I am sure many of you don't know.