Affiliate Portraits
Welcome to the digital market meeting on Thursday, February 20, 2025
Since January 2023, I have offered a digital room for conversations about how we can understand and manage mental health problems without diagnoses and psychotropic drugs. The room has come to be called Digitalt torgmöte and has been open once a month.
Awareness – an unused resource in the Norwegian healthcare system
To meet the health challenges of the future, we must recognize that being human is about more than bodily functions – it is also about meaning, relationships and a deeper understanding of ourselves. The seven columnists encourage a broader conversation about the role of consciousness in creating more health in ourselves and our surroundings.
The Utopia of Reality
When we are asked to organize a health service (in our psychiatric case), the difficulty is to find concrete answers to the specific questions that come from the concrete reality in which it operates. But the responses concerning reality should transcend it (through the utopian element), trying to transform it.
Mental Health – An Umbrella Term with Holes Under Which We...
For me, the term mental health is, at best, a belief system. The world of human emotion is overflowing with theories, beliefs, interventions and possibilities, but very few certainties and facts.
Dramatic Increase in Women’s Overdose Deaths – Mad in Puerto Rico
The report begins with a chilling figure: between 2013 and 2023, nearly 400 women died from overdoses in Puerto Rico, according to data from the Institute of Forensic Sciences.
The Commodification of Mental Disorders: Mental Health and Social Networks
We thus see the memification of psychiatry and the trendification of mental disorders, whose roots are based on the triad pathologization – medicalization – commercialization of existence.
“The Tangalanga Method”, review
The film tells the story of overcoming an illness, represented by Jorge's social problems. This overcoming is virtuous because it has the purpose of helping a friend who is hospitalized. If Jorge's character suffered the same problems today, he would probably be pathologized with some mental disorder.
Moving in and out of Psychiatric Institutions: Indian Women’s Distressing Experiences
For Indian women, absent support from family, gender disadvantages, and poverty lead to longer stays in psychiatric hospitals and halfway homes.
Social Farming: Connecting with land, with community and with history
Social Farming in Ireland has the potential to grow, transform and support the well-being of many more people across the generations, from teenagers seeking to leave school to older adults.
Psychiatrist fired for working with communities and less medicine?
"..But the case and the current media coverage raise deep concerns for us about what it will mean for the many small and large efforts to create a more humane psychiatry – and to criticize the biomedical model and its dominance."
RIGHTS, RESPONSIBILITIES and RESOURCES – Peer support in mental health services
It is essential to remain faithful to one's personal history and experience, focusing on what one wants to do and how to proceed after having transformed a period of crisis into an opportunity. This implies an assumption of responsibility and respect for oneself
The silence of the lambs
Let us briefly list here a series of facts about the company in question and leave them in their indifferent and terrifying silence. Maybe at some point, someone will give them a voice. However, neither the minister in question nor his current boss dared to do so and, I guess here, they never will.
MANIA!?
Previously, when I was on medication, my friends' suicides had mostly aroused in me anger towards the psychiatric system that had mistreated and treated them, and a slight relief that my friends no longer had to suffer, I believed that they would be better off in their current state of being or non-existence than when they were alive. Now, however, it was different and my head, free from the worst chemicals, felt like it was exploding: guilt, fear, what-if-thoughts, longing, rage, sadness.
Research: “Distress was normalised and understood as part of the human...
A new study titled “Designing recovery-oriented care: a qualitative study to inform service design at Kyrie Therapeutic Farm in Ireland” explores how therapeutic farm communities can implement recovery-oriented mental health practices.
This is also a true story.
"The fact that I was a low-class citizen, useless to society because I hadn't paid taxes, and
was suffering from permanent symptoms and the side effects of medication was irrelevant. I
just had to accept my part and be prepared to take more medication if I got worse.
There was no promise of any permanent relief."
How schizophrenia’s devastation turned into a story about hope
Ten golden rules the family learned on their joint path to healing with 'unconditional love' as the ultimate medicine.
Record levels of stress-related sick leave – are amphetamines the solution?
Stress-related sick leave is on the rise, with a 25% increase in five years. The most affected are young mothers aged 30-39. The Swedish Social Insurance Agency writes that the solution to this is for patients (mothers) to find a good balance between work-leisure-rest, which is certainly true, but which can also be easier said than done. See the article here.
Mad in Norway seminar 2024: Video recordings ready
This year's pre-Christmas seminar organized by Mad in Norway was held to a packed audience at the Literature House in Oslo, and more than 500 people followed the event digitally. All the episodes are now available on our YouTube channel.
Stars born by Gods
The story of Rita and Juanita makes it clear to us that never, under any essentialism, should any community be idealized. I say this, because the story of solidarity and loneliness of both women allows us to put an image to different aspects of deficit today in Mexico, or at least that's how we dare to suggest it from what is narrated in the documentary.
Out & About – Boarding school survivors annual conference
Everything that is written about the harm that happens to children who are sent away to school may also be true when children are taken into care. Every time, a child is removed from their home, it is a cause for concern, and no boarding school survivors are not the privileged elite that so many are inclined to label us with.