Mad in America

We have lost in the District Court and in the Court of Appeal. Now we are going back to the Supreme Court, says a ready-to-fight Inger-Mari Eidsvik before the case is to be heard again in the highest court in Norway. If the plaintiffs win, the case is sent back to the District Court for a new hearing.

If the late adolescence/early adulthood period is genuinely ‘critical’ and ‘sensitive’ for still developing brains, then it is precisely this which should make clinicians wary of biochemical interventions!

When psychiatrists – rarely – acknowledge that the effect of pills is small, they often add that this is not important because patients will benefit from the large placebo effect. This is a common misconception among doctors and is due to a logical error. They think that the placebo effect is the difference before and after in a group of patients treated with placebo, which is not true, as spontaneous improvement is also included in this effect

We invite you to read the poem “Cruelty became fashionable”, a collaboration by Gabriel Hereñú and leave your comments

In this article, Neha Jain writes about her field work and wonders what kind of ‘care’ and ‘help’ are possible in the absence of real consent.

We are speaking with Rory Adams, music therapist and Deirdre Howard, Community drum facilitator and hope your interest is peeked by our latest podcast.

In this video, in addition to her personal story, Helene shares the need for a paradigm shift in psychiatry and she does this from the perspective of the professional and the survivor – a rich and powerful combination.

However, it should be considered that even in the presence of a violent demonstration of dissent, the response of a state governed by the rule of law cannot consist in the use of health treatment, but in the use of police action and criminal repression.

"I had a sister who was a couple of years older than me, who suffered from very bad anxiety in adolescence, and my mother always came and was afraid, she was afraid of that anxiety. And he always said that "take this, take diapam, take that, take this, now you have to go to Auroora" and I saw that it was terribly bad, that anxiety. Later I have come across that everyone is afraid of psychosis and that psychosis is a terrible misfortune for a person."

It is not a problem that fear and powerlessness enter the work. It only becomes harmful if care providers do not recognize it or run away from it. Coercion is then the escape route par excellence.

Yesterday came the Court of Appeal's final decision in the "ADHD case". The Court of Appeal does not grant leave to appeal, which means that the administrative court's decision to reject my appeal against the review board's decision to acquit SVT and Fråga doktorn's misleading ADHD element stands.

Could the increase in suicidal behaviour, aggression, anger and defiance be related to the pharmaceutical industry's own medication? The Swedish psychologist Markus Dencker turns to Ole Brumm to understand why diagnoses tend to abound among young psychiatric patients.

Below we share the "Introduction" of the book Health Comunism (Verse, 2022) by Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant, English activists in disability and for health justice. The book advocates a new leftist policy aimed at cutting off the structural relations between capital and one of its main tools of domination and discipline: health.

A recent study published in the British Journal of Guidance & Counselling explores the psychosocial consequences of unemployment to reflect on and critique the role of psychology in the contemporary socio-politico context.

Another challenge is to find psychologists who have any reading about damage caused by psychiatric drugs and who do not interpret the option of not using them as "resistance to treatment".

In this essay Bernabé De Vinsenci reflects on what happens to bodies when a society becomes a madhouse.

In this story, the author explores the complications of living with a neurological disability in India. Through his experience he shares his tryst with accessibility and raises questions about inaccessible infrastructure. He further highlights the unique cultural aspects that structure an individual’s experience of living with a disability in India.

The great Ivor Browne, who many will know for his humane approach to human distress, died this week to widespread plaudits from the media. This is right and fitting for a man who gave so much to people, was responsible for liberating many from prison-like institutions and highlighting that distress very often comes from deep-seated trauma, not brain disorders.

Leading ADHD researchers outline four mistakes that turned ADHD from a description of behavior into a medical disease.

We publish the article by Dr. Ludovica Turchetti, speech therapist, on the devastating phenomenon that is becoming increasingly popular in recent years and which concerns the various psychiatric diagnoses in children.