Tag: rethinking medical model

In this interview for Pacific Standard, David Dobbs, who profiled Nev Jones this month, discusses the ways that the mental health community is beginning to...

From Massive: The public generally conceptualizes alcoholism as a biological brain disease and rejects the notion that social and cultural factors may contribute to addiction....

From Critical Psychiatry: The Critical Psychiatry Network's 2017 conference raised a variety of issues and featured a range of differing perspectives pertaining to the societal...

From Science of Us: There seems to be a growing interest in the concept of healthy voice-hearing. The idea that hearing voices may not be...

From The Conversation: The search for a single, identifiable cause underlying each mental disorder has yielded very few useful results. New research suggests that a network...

From the University of Liverpool News: In a new podcast, Dr. Peter Kinderman, the vice-president of the British Psychological Society, argues that emotional distress is...

A new issue of Asylum Magazine is available. This issue is the second in a two-part series highlighting new and original work on the theme...

The producers of “Healing Voices” – a new social action documentary about mental health – have announced an innovative plan to release the film via community screening partners in a coordinated one-night global event. Written and Directed by PJ Moynihan of Digital Eyes Film, “Healing Voices” explores the experience commonly labeled as ‘psychosis’ through the stories of real-life individuals, and asks the question: What are we talking about when we talk about ‘mental illness’? The film follows three subjects – Oryx, Jen, Dan – over nearly five years, and features interviews with notable international experts including: Robert Whitaker, Dr. Bruce Levine, Celia Brown, Will Hall, Dr. Marius Romme, and others, on the history of psychiatry and the rise of the ‘medical model’ of mental illness.

Writing on his critical psychiatry blog, Duncan Double critiques Joe Herbert’s piece on “Why can't we treat mental illness by fixing the brain?” in Aeon. While Herbert admits that there is a "mysterious and seemingly unfathomable gap" between psychology and neuroscience, which "bedevils not only psychiatry, but all attempts to understand the meaning of humanity,” he goes on to speculate that someday psychiatrists will be able to relate symptoms to brain activity.

Ronald Pies, MD, is one of American's most eminent and prestigious psychiatrists.  He is the Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of Psychiatric Times, and he is a Professor of Psychiatry at both Syracuse and Tufts. I disagree with many of Dr. Pies' contentions, and I have expressed these disagreements in detail in various posts. But there is one area where I have to acknowledge Dr. Pies' efforts:  he never gives up in his defense of his beloved psychiatry, even in the face of the most damaging counter-evidence. For instance, on more than one occasion, he has asserted, with apparent sincerity and conviction, that psychiatry never promoted the chemical imbalance theory of depression!