Tag: antipsychiatry

Unbiased experts must examine the claims and research of psychiatry and issue a report as to whether psychiatry not only has a valid medical basis, but whether this basis justifies the widespread violation of medical ethics and the routine use of imprisonment and torture.

Service-users' experience was at the heart of everything the critics spoke about, as well as the importance of relying on the most up-to-date and accurate evidence.

Americans appear to be increasingly terrified by the possibility of ostracism, including for failing to conform to psychiatry dogma. This prevents critical thinking.

Although I disagree with much of Dr. Aftab's article, it is, nevertheless, a courageous piece of writing. He calls out many of psychiatry's contradictions and errors.

I realized that nobody would be able to help me if I didn't help myself. Simply because society wants a cheap, technical solution that will leave me in a state of dependency and frustration for the rest of my life.

Madness Network News, founded in 1972 by two women inmates of Agnews State Hospital, was an anti-psychiatry journal that served as the focal point for organizing throughout North America, and even overseas.

The notion that one can help a despondent person by giving him or her mood-altering drugs, while systematically ignoring the reason for his/her despondency is a travesty of a helping profession.

We are winning this battle. And I use the word battle with no apologies or misgivings. Psychiatry has been utterly unreceptive to the concerns of our movement.

Never in human history did a powerful institution, no matter how harmful and corrupt, slide into self-inflicted irrelevancy. Institutions like the current psychiatric system can only be toppled by a powerful social movement.

Wherever you find mental health services to have expanded, you find a parallel increase in the numbers who have been classed as disabled due to a mental health disorder.

To those who say that major scientific/medical advances since 1975 have made going to a biological psychiatrist a rational choice, I say: What advances? 45 years have passed: Is any psychiatric “diagnosis” now verified by lab test, x-ray, or physical exam finding?

A dialogue between Nev Jones and Sandy Steingard about Mad in America, critics of psychiatry, medication for psychosis, Open Dialogue, and the need for racial and class justice.

The Vice article was presented as an exploration of the “movement against psychiatry,” and yet you can see, once it is deconstructed, how it told a story that surely pleased the promoters of the conventional narrative, and put the “critics” on the defensive at almost every turn.

I am a psychiatrist and I have been watching my profession deteriorate for many decades. This is my most direct written statement about the dangers of stepping inside a modern psychiatrist’s office. My conclusions are the culmination of mountains of research authored by me and by an increasing number of other psychiatrists, scientists and journalists.

Psychiatrist Mohammed Abouelleil Rashed explores a way forward for psychiatry in responding to the Mad activism of service users.

If this were an old sci-fi movie, psychiatry would be the evil alien race on a collision course with earth that plans to completely take it over as soon as it can. That we are not treating psychiatry as the malevolent invader that it is shows only how deeply we’ve fallen for its facade of helping people.

Last year, Ronald Pies, MD and Mark Ruffalo, LCSW published an article titled "The Reality of Mental Illness." In it they claim that "most of what is asserted by antipsychiatry is easily refuted by the scientific evidence." Why then do they not refute it? The reality is that they malign us because they have no rational response to our criticisms.

From Truthdig: Last week marked 40 years since Franco Basaglia’s revolutionary work in Trieste, Italy, led to the groundbreaking Legge 180 (Law 180, also known...

In Politics of the Mind: Marxism and Mental Distress, Iain Ferguson aims to use the marxist approach “not only to make sense of mental distress but also help us address and change the material conditions that give rise to it.” He begins by describing the ‘crisis in mental health’ that disproportionately affects the unemployed, poor, and oppressed.

We’re not dysfunctional or bad just because there are two of us in here. What’s more important than being a socially acceptable single person is that we know how to get along and manage our trauma and our life together. We just need to be accepted as we are.

This week on the Mad in America Podcast we launch our series on forced treatment, interviewing antipsychiatry scholar Bonnie Burstow and neurodiversity scholar Nick Walker. Central to both Nick and Bonnie’s work is the concept of cognitive liberty, or freedom and integrity of the mind.

Without judging the motivation of people presenting and speaking at conferences, I’d like to ask the question: can we achieve more with these conferences than generating knowledge and touching people's hearts? Are we preparing the ground for change or are we marking time?

How did I get here? What turned me from loyal acolyte into fearsome-clawed rebel, itching to take on the high priests of psychiatry? Well, there is nothing like being given a taste of psychiatry’s vile medicine for igniting the revolutionary furnace and getting it glowing white hot.

What exactly does “antipsychiatry” mean? Is the term useful or hopelessly ambiguous? Can one be antipsychiatry without being abolitionist? And if one wants to end the use of psychiatric coercion only, does that position qualify as antipsychiatry?

Those of us who are radicals are commonly struggling to find ways to confer legitimacy on positions which substantially challenge an oppressive status quo. In this article, I will be exploring how to accomplish such feats successfully.