Which Would You Prefer: Electroshock or a Safe Taper?
Imagine you’ve spent your entire life as a healthy person, seven decades in fact, and suddenly being recommended ECT by the psychiatry department of a prestigious university.
New Research Links Psychotropic Drugs to Heart and Pancreatic Risks While Keto Diet Shows...
This week Mad in America examines three studies related to the adverse effects of psychotropic drugs and one that investigates the effect of keto...
Initiation or Psychosis? My Descent Into the Underworld
If my nervous system opens wide, if I descend into underworld states, it is not to glorify them. It is to return with language.
Fighting Psychiatric Subjectivation and Helping Others Along the Way: An Interview with Prateeksha Sharma
Prateeksha Sharma reflects on her own experience of recovery from psychosis with the help of music, family, and dogs, sheds lights on the treatment harms that often go unnamed and thus unnoticed, and discusses how to claim narrative, dignity, and voice.
Research Reveals Pharma Profits Outweigh Anti-Kickback Penalties
The pharmaceutical industry has a well documented history of corruption and placing profit above public health. A new research letter published in JAMA Open...
What If the Problem Is the Lens?
The very phrase "mental health" implies that our emotional life is organised along a continuum of health and illness, like physical disease.
Questioning the Prescription: Antidepressants and the Medicalization of Childhood
This week Mad in America explores four recently published articles related to antidepressant use in children and adolescents. The first reports that although clinical...
Finding Support Outside ‘The System’
How a friend who wasn’t a mental health professional saved me from suicide by supporting me in a way my parents and the professionals hadn’t.
The Fight for the Soul of Psychotherapy: An Interview with Linda Michaels
Linda Michaels is a psychologist in private practice in Chicago and a co-founder of the Psychotherapy Action Network (PsiAN).
She trained at the Illinois...
Are We Overlooking Homicidal Ideation in Psychiatry?
If patients are willing to bring these thoughts into treatment, psychiatry should be better prepared to receive them.
All Major Pharma Companies Implicated in Bribery Schemes, New Report Says
Pfizer, J&J, Eli Lilly, BMS, AstraZeneca, GSK, and more all engaged in systematic bribery schemes, according to decades of OECD reports. That's the finding...
Alfred Adler: Psychoanalysis for the People
Adler provides a starting point to end the apartheid within psychoanalysis that means psychology for the rich and psychics for the poor.
Therapy Treats the Individual, but the Problem Is the Self We Were Taught to...
If human regulation is fundamentally relational, then well-being cannot be reduced to insight, learning, growth, or individual coping strategies alone.
Coercive Measures in Psychiatry are Increasing, Traumatic, and Linked to Systemic Failings
This week, Mad in America explores three studies related to the use of coercive psychiatric measures. The first finds that rates of coercive measures...
Undoing Thirteen Years of Iatrogenic Illness
No one was ever going to tell me that I was never mentally ill. It would mean that everything The System did to me was a lie.
Examining Psychiatric Medication Tapering and Withdrawal: The Evolving Role of Pharmacists — A Conversation...
Agnes Higgins and Cathal Cadogan join us to discuss their work on understanding the experiences of people tapering from psychiatric medication and the role that pharmacists could potentially play when people are considering stopping their psychiatric drugs.
Wouter Kusters and God
God may not exist, but man’s relationship with God certainly does exist, and that is what mysticism is all about.
Psychobabble of the Month: Depressed? Try Exercise-in-a-Pill!
Exercise consistently shows positive results for depression... so how about a prescription for "exercise mimetic" pills instead?
From Silence to Accountability: How Massachusetts’ Special Commission on State Institutions Changed the Law
This is the beginning of an effort to restore dignity to those whose lives were forgotten for far too long.
I Can Barely Breathe: The Journey Continues
I want more for myself than just being a sweet, docile, compliant mental patient. I want a voice and a seat at the table.
Spiritual Emergency and the Collective Work of Staying Alive: An Interview with Nisha Gupta
Nisha Gupta reflects on spiritual emergency, wounded healing, and why staying alive in times of profound pain is not only an individual task but a collective one.
What Frontline Addiction Nurses See That Policy Debates About Medication Miss
Medication stabilizes the body and reduces risk, but the deeper work of recovery unfolds gradually through therapy, support, and daily effort.
TikTok Videos Portray ADHD Stimulants in Overwhelmingly Positive Light, Study Finds
Direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising of pharmaceuticals is a controversial topic within healthcare and psychiatry, with only two countries (US and New Zealand) allowing this practice....
Doomed: A Psychiatry Comic
The prescription still lives in my chart, even though I only took it for one month, 15 years ago. As I navigate health care as an adult, I still have to answer for it.
Mental Health and the Assault on Autonomy in the New America
These myths lead to seeing the homeless as mentally ill and the mentally ill as irredeemable and “other,” impeding effective care.
