The ODDESSI: Open Dialogue, The Lancet, and a Trojan Horse
DESSI trial results provide a beginning for rethinking psychiatric care
Open Dialogue and ODDESSI: What Have We Learned?
I found Open Dialogue to be a compelling and deeply humane way of working but I also learned how hard it is to implement and sustain.
The Abyss and Beyond
Psilocybin seemed less interested in helping me avoid the abyss than in showing me that there was an entire landscape beyond it.
When Stopping Prescription Drugs Is Hard: Alicia Martin and the TaperMate Story
Alicia Martin is an Australian community pharmacist and the creator of an ingenious mobile app, TaperMate, which aims to help people with hyperbolic drug tapering and prescribed drug withdrawal.
Clancy’s Lawyer Blew the Chance for Lindsay to Go Free
If there is a second trial for Lindsay, I hope her lawyer puts a psychopharmacologist or neurotoxicologist on the stand.
Pharmaceutical Industry Corruption Is Structural, Systemic, and Profitable, New Review Finds
A new empirical review published in the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics reports that pharmaceutical industry corruption is a structural, industry-wide problem. Author...
Open Dialogue Approach Cuts Psychiatric Hospital Use in Major Trial
The ODDESSI trial found that people’s reported recovery, quality of life and satisfaction with services improved with Open Dialogue.
Antidepressants Are Major Drivers of Suicides
For almost 40 years, psychiatric leaders have denied that antidepressants increase suicides despite overwhelming evidence.
A Call for a Paradigm Shift in Schizophrenia Treatment: Reassessing Long-Term Antipsychotic Use and...
The cumulative evidence challenges the assumption that lifelong antipsychotic treatment is necessary or beneficial for most individuals with schizophrenia.
What I Learned After Losing My Partner to Polypharmacy
I am left with questions that cannot be resolved retrospectively. Why were medications added without clear longitudinal review of cumulative exposure?
Remembering Dory Previn: An Interview by Peter Sterling in 1974
Dory Previn was an American lyricist, singer-songwriter, and poet whose deeply personal work explored her struggles with mental health, including experiences of psychosis. In October 1974, she met with neuroscientist Peter Sterling for a candid conversation about her psychiatric treatment.
From Helplessness to Power: Collective Phantasy and Politics in Contemporary Iran
The cultural psyche evokes historical figures as phantasies to transform helplessness into a desire for revenge and restoration of power.
ADHD UK Cannot Hide the Flawed Science Behind the Diagnosis and Its Treatment
The extensive critique of the biomedical account of ADHD and its treatment with stimulant medication has persisted for decades.
U.S. Antidepressant Drug Labels Still Lag Behind Canada
SSRI labels in Canada warn about the risk of suicide as well as “violence,” including “harm toward others,” without age restrictions.
On Dialectics and Disappearance
DBT is made of a soft enough fabric, but you can trace the threads of applied behavioral analysis in its lineage if you know where the seams are, or if you are me and your fingers crash into them without meaning to.
First-Person Knowledge and the Meanings of Madness: An Interview with Gail Hornstein
Psychologist Gail Hornstein discusses her search for the meanings of madness, from asylum artifacts and memoirs to the contemporary peer-support groups reshaping how people understand voices and visions.
The Epidemic of Depression Diagnoses and Antidepressant Prescribing
Part of being human is to have difficulties, but they can be handled better if we don’t give people psychiatric diagnoses and drugs.
When Medical Science Refuses to Correct Itself
Science is supposed to be self-correcting. But what happens when the journals entrusted to uphold this principle become its gatekeepers?
The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations: Psychiatry’s Suppression of the Highly Capable
How many highly capable people are lost to a system that champions mediocrity as a necessary implication of mental illness?
To the Few Psychiatrists Who Still Believe in ECT: See You in Court
I hope that legal cases like these will encourage psychiatrists to think twice before administering such a potentially damaging treatment.
When the Treatment Becomes Part of the Illness
Trusting the psychiatrists, I boarded a ship that would carry me on a decades-long and treacherous journey with psychiatric drugs.
My Mother Had to Be Dying Before Anyone Would Take Her Off the Drugs
On hospice, a psychiatrist finally said yes to deprescribing. Once someone is on hospice, taking medications away becomes the normal thing to do rather than the dangerous thing.
Mad Studies Is More Than Lived Experience: An Interview with Merrick Daniel Pilling
Pilling explains how Mad Studies moves from first-person knowledge to questions of sanism, psychiatric authority, mutual aid, and collective resistance.
The Existential Was Never Meant to Be Solved Alone
The sessions had value, but the relief I sought—a true shift in how I relate to the world—felt impossible.
Independent Evaluation Finds No Benefit to Coercion Under New York’s Kendra’s Law
Kendra’s Law is a New York State statute that allows courts to force people with “severe mental illness” into involuntary Assisted Outpatient Treatment (AOT)....
