Videos

When Carina Håkansson sent out an invitation for a symposium on "Pharmaceuticals: Risks and Alternatives," some of the world's top scientists, along with experts-by-experience, came from 13 countries to explore better ways to respond to people in crisis.

This morning Kayla Harrison won the first ever Olympic gold medal in the history of USA Judo. Kayla has overcome many, many obstacles on...

Jenna Fogle discusses her experience struggling with depression as a teenager, and the consequent harm done by psychiatric drug treatment.

Robert Whitaker notes on Al Jazeera's "Inside Story" that a helpful diagnostic text must be both reliable and valid, and the DSM is neither...

“Psychiatric Drugs are More Dangerous than You Ever Imagined” is the newest video in my series Simple Truths about Psychiatry.  It provides a simple, direct and inescapable warning about this epidemic of harm induced by psychiatric drugs. The video sounds a necessary alarm about this growing tragedy, involving millions of people and their families, who never foresaw the disabling results of taking psychiatric drugs and giving them to their children.

Most people believe that children diagnosed with ADHD misbehave because they possess an inferior inhibitory system that renders them less able to suppress unacceptable actions. However, this belief has numerous shortcomings. This series of videos challenges these assumptions and offers alternative explanations for why a child may exhibit ADHD behaviors.

I've previously written about the possible role of compassion focused therapy in helping people relate better to problematic voices, in my posts Could compassionate self talk replace hostile voices?, Feed Your Demons!, and A Paradox: Is Our System for Responding to Threats Itself a Threat? I'm happy to see more interest being taken in this kind of approach, and a video has just become available which, in 5 minutes, very coherently explains how a compassion focused approach can completely transform a person's relationship with their voices and so transform the person's life!

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/CUuyzoTI948" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> Thomas Insel's TedEducation presentation. "Today, thanks to better early detection, there are 63% fewer deaths from heart disease than...

"My studies in this area lead me to a very uncomfortable conclusion: Our citizens would be far better off if we removed all the psychotropic drugs from the market, as doctors are unable to handle them. It is inescapable that their availability creates more harm than good." - Peter Gøtzsche, MD; Co-founder of the Cochrane Collaboration

Professor John Nash discusses the discrepancies between the book & film "A Beautiful Mind" and his life.  While he endorses the portrayal of mental...

The Cannabis and Psychosis Awareness Project, a four-year study from Canada that was released on Tuesday, finds that smoking marijuana - particularly heavy use in...

On June 21, 1967, at the age of 17, Lucy Winer was committed to the female violent ward of Kings Park State Hospital following...

In November 2012, Cardiff, Wales, more than two hundred and fifty people who hear voices, see visions and have other unusual and extreme experiences (referred to as “hearing voices” in the rest of this post), family members, friends, activists and allied experts by profession came together from around the world. The purpose of the three-day meeting was to celebrate the twenty fifth anniversary of the formation of hearing voices movement, to consider the lessons learnt so far and to envisage what we should be doing over the next 25 years. The excellent film, "Voices Matter", that you can now view on this site is a record of the event and I strongly recommend that you take a look.

It was an awesome experience to give a TEDx Talk at my old school, because, frankly, it was an acknowledgement by an elite institution that I've done something in my life worth listening to. I hope you appreciate my talk and share it with others. So many people who are affected by the mental health system in North America today have no idea how much the rise of the DSM and biopsychiatry has to do with the Reagan era and neoliberal economic policies that reshaped the whole language and culture of mental health. It's like a bulldozed neighborhood with shiny new buildings, after a while people forget how they got there and they just seem "normal."

This video from Bipolarwakingup.com explores why what most people think about the relationship between genetics, chemical imbalance theory and bipolar disorder is pure myth.

Bruce Levine speaks about Nelson Algren, Phil Ochs, Marginalization, the Mental Health Industry, and the Occupy Movement at the 23rd Annual Nelson Algren Birthday...

Robert Whitaker speaks in this video, recorded May 2, 2012, on "The History of Eugenics in the United States & How It Affects Psychiatric...

"Take These Broken Wings," a 75-minute documentary on recovery from schizophrenia without medication. Featuring Joanne Greenberg (bestselling author of "I Never Promised You a...

Soteria Vermont is a project of the Vermont state government, which seeks to be a leader in mental healthcare. When Hurricane Irene washed away...

For outsiders like me who are really critical of mainstream psychiatry, the first thing to understand is that "community psychiatry" is a counterculture within the larger culture of biomedical psychiatry. When I say "counterculture" I don't mean these people had flowers in their hair or face piercings.

The search for animal analogues for mental illness continues to inadvertently show that much if not most of what is thought of as mental...

"A small percentage of those taking antidepressants will become homocidal and/or suicidal. But a small percentage of 30,000,000 is more than hundreds of thousands...

David Healy "likened psychiatry’s attitude toward its faltering legitimacy to the Vatican’s widely derided response to its child sex abuse scandal by priests —...

This video by Pat Deegan, inspired by the Newtown tragedy, was brought to our attention by BeyondMeds.com. Beyond Meds →

Subscribers to Mad in America might be interested in a Keynote Lecture given by Professor Nikolas Rose in Nottingham on May 15th 2013. In this lecture Professor Rose very thoughtfully challenges a number of the assumptions which underpin conventional and contemporary psychiatric practice. He asks five hard questions:

• Is there (really) an epidemic of mental illness?
• Does the path to understanding mental disorder lie through the brain?
• What is the role of diagnosis and of diagnostic manuals?
• Should we seek early identification of those at risk of future mental pathology?
• What is the place of patients, users, survivors, & consumers of mental health systems?