Tag: Psychiatry

A new review finds a lack of available guidance on how to effectively monitor adverse effects of antipsychotic drug clozapine.

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” said Edmund Burke. This is as true on...

Study reveals most patients are dissatisfied with prescribers' support when discontinuing antidepressants.

A new study promotes the use of a standardized approach to antidepressant tapering.

Dear Psychiatry: We are done with your juvenile black-and-white bullying tactics that argue that because you cannot neatly contain Us in a box of your design that We are somehow the problem.

Going into psychiatry as a naïve 25-year-old, I had no idea what I would discover. If I knew then what I know now, I wouldn’t have chosen this field.

In the wake of psychiatry, there was a fracture, a gulf that opened between me and the authentic sound of my voice when it is connected and resonates with my truth.

The term “psychiatric survivor” says it all in just two words. In no other medical specialty do the patients call themselves survivors because they survived despite being exposed to that specialty.

After 34 years, I've concluded that some psychologists/psychiatrists may genuinely want to help people, but they certainly don't have a good toolbox to do it with and, quite likely, never will.

I wanted to interrogate the assumptions that pervade theory, research, and practice in mental health. You can see the emptiness of the empirical and philosophical paradigms in circulation.

With the leadership of industry and their cosseted, lapdog doctors, psychiatric medications are prescribed indiscriminately to nearly anyone entering a physician’s office with a psychological complaint.

We must advocate for policies that create environments that are more nurturing for us all in a society that helps provide people with meaning, a sense of community, and a sense of civic duty.

An analysis of FDA adverse event reports related to esketamine shows the potential for negative effects such as suicidal and self-injurious ideation.

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.

I trained in psychiatry in the 1950s. I saw psychiatry switch from trying to help patients to understand themselves better to trying to find a drug that would relieve their symptoms.

Paying attention to the science tells us that we need to look beyond formal services. People need connection and meaning as well as basics such as safety, housing, and work.

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.

Public mental health authorities continue to oppress persons with psychosocial conditions through a combination of punitive and discriminatory laws that are constructed with a "best interests" paradigm in mind and a medical model that pathologises difference and dissent. 

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?

In Pūras' new UN report, his use of biomedical language seems at odds with his message to move beyond the medicalization of distress.

MIA’s Ayurdhi Dhar interviews the well-known sociologist of medicine, Nikolas Rose, about the role psychiatry plays in shaping how we manage ourselves and our world.

Allen Frances' latest article: There are problems in the psychiatric field, but none of these problems can be blamed on psychiatry. But the spurious promotion of psychiatric "diagnoses" as real illnesses, and the routine prescribing of chemical and electrical "cures" were and are psychiatric inventions.

The words psychiatrist and psychiatry, along with their counterparts in other languages, have come to mean something that is not reflected in their Greek origins. Would you allow a psychiatrist to treat an illness of the soul (in Greek, ψυχή [psychí]) if he or she couldn’t explain what part of the human person psychiatrists treat?

The metaphor of “mental disease” is doing more harm than good. Rather than being a tool for communication, it has crossed the boundary from a metaphor to a theory that underpins much of what happens within public mental health services. This places psychiatrists in a position of dutiful compliance with what is essentially a fallacious model.

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.