Mad in America

This is what unprocessed emotions can look like. Often relating to trauma. But what is trauma? When someone hurts you? When society hurts you? When you feel “wrong,” excluded? When you are not taught how to love yourself (by being loved)? When you lack the tools to live with, because you never learned any life skills?

With these subtle topics, I feel that my language skills are not enough to explain. Madness means crossing the limits of normal and limited life, and includes breaking chains, but also includes risks and dangers, of course.

We have seen the immense influence of social networks both in the vast production of content based on nomenclatures from psychiatric vocabulary and the exhaustive exploration of certain psychiatric categories that broaden the reach of publications. Not all, just some.

A documentary by Ulises Rosell that shows what daily life is like for actress Valentina Bassi as the mother of Lisandro, a young neurodivergent man with a disability and in need of constant support.

In this myth-busting article, MISA writer Ayushi Jolly writes about the limitations of self-care, how it can lead to additional pressure and guilt, and how both ideas of ‘self’ and ‘care’ are different in many parts of the world.

These critiques rock the foundation of how most of the western world view and treat mental illness currently. If they are accepted, and indeed they are scientifically robust analyses, it raises a shocking spectre for the profession of psychiatry, which, with the law on its side, engages in treating people – whether forcibly or not, with highly questionable methods. Perhaps this is not surprising, given the history of psychiatry.

"I have seen how psychiatric staff have escalated situations to justify the use of coercion and restraint. I have also seen how a misunderstanding has come close to leading to restraint. "

"It came up again, this time in Helsingin Sanomat. An article about the significance of a psychiatric diagnosis for a person. I can no longer read this type of article without being provoked, just skimming through it, but that sentence was found as such: “ The autism diagnosis was a relief and brought an explanation for everything . ” I already wrote feedback to the newspaper in question about the previous similar article, I don’t feel like doing it anymore. "

From shouting and threats to interventions without consent, obstetric violence is a form of gender violence that profoundly impacts postpartum mental health. Dr. Keila Castro proposes ways to heal.

Often psychological problems and relationship problems originate in childhood and have to do with the attachment pattern you developed as a child. The way your parents dealt with you – whether you received (sufficient) attention and in what way – has been decisive. It can therefore yield a lot to delve into adhesion. This article goes beyond the four well-known adhesion patterns from Bowlby's theory and describes 'subpatterns' with clear characteristics.

The motto "no matter how confused someone is, they haven't lost their whole self" was a guiding principle at Sweden's first and so far only Soteria house, which operated during the 1990s. Here, psychiatric care was provided without coercion - a whole decade without either suicide or coercive measures. Majka Stenberg and Petra Horn explain how care worked at Nacka Soteria.

In 2006, the Danish Health Authority warned against combining antipsychotics with benzodiazepines because it increases mortality by 50-65% . But what do we see in the medical records? Virtually all patients with psychosis receive one or more antipsychotics and also benzodiazepines.

If it is true that mental health is not psychiatry and that mental disorder is part of a distress that has its origin in a complex of factors, which in a somewhat too simplistic way are defined as bio-psycho-social, then I believe that psychiatry cannot omnipotently take charge of it but that it must find a less reductive interpretation than the currently dominant one.

If the dominant psychiatric paradigm does not radically change, which unfortunately has been embraced by Psychologists, Social Workers, Nurses and other professionals involved in the provision of mental health services (without this meaning that I question their humanity), the tragedy of the way we approach and treat/care for people who experience mental suffering will continue and be reproduced, and even worse, as a non-tragedy.

My study investigates the data available in all three sources and finds that they are incomplete and inconsistent, making any conclusions about patient groups’ conflict-of-interest and funding unreliable.

What is the effect of experiencing safety and why can it be transformative for you as Dr. Stephen Porges describes? I hope to be able to take you along in this, for many, complex matter. This science is nice, but what can you do with this knowledge?

Recently, the government has come out with two strategic documents dealing with 'mental health and suicide prevention'. Important documents for our future. One extends over the years 2025-2026. The other over the years 2025-2034.

OVERESTIMATED BENEFIT: - If more than minimal improvement is required, a strikingly large proportion of patients do not receive a meaningful effect from antipsychotics. Trond Aarre (pictured) believes that the requirement of a high probability of effect of compulsory treatment according to the Mental Health Act is unlikely to be met.

This question, provocative in itself, is meant merely as an invitation to debate. It arises from the state of real malaise in which we find ourselves, oppressed by a closed psychiatric ideology defined by its role as a dogmatic science that, when it comes to the object of its research, has only been able to define its diversity and incomprehensibility, translating them concretely into social stigmatization.

After all, who has not thought, after reading endlessly about what goes on in the heads of either mental patients or therapist-cum-psychiatrists; what are they all hoping to achieve if not to transcend the clinical-psychiatric framework?