Tag: critical psychiatry

Psychologist and existential thinker Brent Robbins reflects on a lifetime of work, the limits of psychiatric diagnosis, and what facing mortality has taught him about joy and human connection.

How do some people find and harness transformative meaning in their experiences conceptualised as psychosis by clinical psychiatry?

Psychiatry has fallen to too many fads and abusive treatments over the decades to hold current treatments with any confidence.

Leading psychiatrists appear unfazed that their theories and treatments are repeatedly proven to be scientifically invalid and discarded.

Justin Karter interviews Milutin Kostić on the fundamental flaws in depression research and its neglect of human complexity.

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.

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 have found that trauma is frequently at the root of many eventual psychological and medical issues. Medications often only worsen the disconnection caused by trauma.

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.

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.

Early in my social work career, I truly believed that medication and forced confinement helped heal “mental illness.” Then an abrupt awakening completely altered my worldview.

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.

Training for conceptual competence in psychiatry provides a new way forward to address theoretical and philosophical issues in mental health research and practice.

For the last forty years, psychiatry has been comprehensively critiqued from a myriad of disciplines including sociology, psychology, and the user movement. Is there anything that can be salvaged from the psychiatry project? How would a psychiatrist practice ethically in such a nefarious environment?

MIA’s Justin Karter interviews critical psychiatrist and philosopher Pat Bracken about the necessity of challenging received wisdom.

Founding member of the Critical Psychiatry Network (CPN), psychiatrist Duncan B. Double, reviews the past 20 years of the Critical Psychiatry Network in an editorial published in the British Journal of Psychiatry.

Attempting to locate the mechanisms of psychiatric disorder is a step in the wrong direction and fails to challenge potentially unjust social practices.

An interview with Dr. Sandy Steingard, Medical Director at Howard Center and Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the College of Medicine of the University of Vermont. Dr. Steingard serves as Board Chair of the Foundation for Excellence in Mental Health Care and is editor of the book 'Critical Psychiatry, Controversies and Clinical Implications' due in 2019.

Researchers offer a critical take on the inclusion of the Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder in the DSM-V.

Are philosophical misunderstandings behind the failure of neuroscience to provide useful clinical research?