Mad in America

Psychiatrist Yousaf Raza details the problems with psychiatric health care in Pakistan and shows how to find a way forward.

When we look to pills to solve one problem, we forget the opponent processes the body will naturally employ to return to homeostasis.

Antidepressants do not protect against suicide. According to placebo-controlled trials, they double the risk of suicide.

Medical practitioners base their practice on clinical experience, rather than the sound published health research, which they distrust.

The directors of the hospital, considering the empty spaces provided by its lack of services, decided to allow “milicianos” to move in, along with their pigs.

California has decided to systematically restrain, incarcerate, forcibly strip, and drug its now sizable unhoused population.

Peter Gøtzsche: To reduce the risk of withdrawal symptoms, it is necessary to respect the form of the binding curve.

Even though psychiatrists don't use any medical knowledge when making diagnoses, they do have MD degrees, and that's enough.

Despite noting financial problems, global conflict, and climate crisis, the report was on how individuals could work on their own stress.

According to the preeminent health and rights bodies in the world, the WHO and the UN, psychiatry has to change entirely.

The biomedical model ignores the social context in which mental distress exists, despite a large body of evidence of that link.

Much of the vulnerability to antidepressant withdrawal may be related not to bipolar disorder, but a trait called “bipolarity.”

In the final blog in Peter Gøtzsche's series, he presents his concluding thoughts and suggestions for the future of psychiatry.

Although it professes to divert calls away from carceral responses, #988 may actually be increasing involuntary interventions.

Two goals are in direct conflict for doctors when it comes to antidepressant prescriptions: fully informed consent versus maximizing placebo value.

Discussing how psychiatric drugs lead to a more chronic course for depression and psychosis.

What if madness isn’t a defective form of reasoning, but a distinctive style of reasoning?

How do I want to live with what happened? I can't change the past, but I can choose how to move forward, focusing on progress, not perfection.

The Tromsø ward has shown that offering patients the option to forgo psychiatric medication, or to taper from the drugs, can be a successful model of care.

In the debate about antidepressant withdrawal, I present a middle ground, where the views of both sides are understood to have origins in wanting to help people.