Yearly Archives: 2013

A cogent, insightful blog by MentalHealthCop reviews the literature for and against psychiatric treatment, including Creating Mental Illness by Allan Horwitz, research by Richard Bentall,...

Schizophrenia Bulletin wrestles with its identity and mission in light of current challenges to the diagnostic categories. Article →

Noted schizophrenia researchers Robin Murray, Robert Zipursky and Thomas Reilly write in Schizophrenia Bulletin that "mental health professionals need to join with patients and...

Authors of a 1999 paper that promoted medication over behavioral therapy for A.D.H.D.,  in fact dismissing behavioral therapy as unnecessary in light of the apparent...

Physician Daniela Drake writes on Salon that "When we rush to prescribe boatloads of Adderall, we miss lesser-known disorders holding kids back. I know...

A fictitious, familiar, yet incomplete NIMH press release appears below. Choose one term from each parenthesis to fill in each blank. You may select answers that reflect positions of the NIMH and/or assumptions of the biomedical model (listed first in each parentheses), or alternative answers based on science and/or reality (listed second). It’s up to you!

GSK has recently announced that it will cease paying doctors for promoting its drugs and sponsoring them to attend conferences and sever the link between pay for its sales representatives and the numbers of prescriptions physicians write. My reading of GSK’s annual report leaves me in no doubt that they are changing their business model because it is likely to increase their profitability – not because they are being forced to. There is a niche in the market for a pharmaceutical company to become the leader in ethical practice. It is not necessary for GSK to be ethical in reality but to create the perception of being so.

I was never told directly that I had 'schizophrenia', and I am very glad about this. I know I was feeling bad, very bad, and was unsure of what to do, but I don’t see how a diagnosis could have helped me at that time. What could I have done with it? To be marked with a label like that would likely have caused me to rebel even more.

Hey Mad in America Community! Happy New Year! I want to share an exciting project with you that's going on at The Icarus Project. Members of The Icarus project have been imagining maps and roads and labyrinths that would lead us in our journey and ground us in the moment. These have been called “wellness maps” or “mad maps” – reminder documents we create for ourselves and the people around us about our wellness goals, warning signs, strategies for health and who we trust to look out for our best interests when we’re not at our best. As I've been saying for years, “The act of figuring out what it means personally to be healthy is about learning to leave a trail back to how we want to be. The clearer we articulate it, the easier it is to get back there.”

The case of this young girl, virtually kidnapped by Harvard psychiatrists who had her parents' custody rights taken away, has become a well-reported scandal. Ordinary people are seeing that the power of psychiatry, which has no place in a democratic society, can be used against regular folks. It isn't just a danger to the crazed psychotic killers that people with psychiatric labels are portrayed to be. This is a critical moment for our movement, and we should not ignore it.

Every year around this time, millions of people make their New Year’s resolutions. In many ways, our resolutions mirror the willful approach that is needed to overcome psychological conditions, even those of a severe nature. We must be cautious about agents which serve to dull us to our particular circumstances and state of mind, whether it be medications or otherwise.

I imagine if I were to get a lot of presents, I might want to return some of the stuff I'd received. Similarly, I like to return stuff of any kind that feels excessive or like it isn't useful to me, or isn't mine to have. I once had a unique experience with a young acupuncturist/Chinese medicine doctor in training. He asked me a question that in my 31 years no doctor had ever asked me before. Yet it was a simple question. “What do you think your health issues are about?” It instantly shook me out of my habitual thinking and “role” as a patient. In a sense he was “returning me my stuff.”

In this article I explore legal capacity as it has impacted my life, through the lens of a negative experience and a positive one. My aim is to encourage people to be aware that legal capacity is a social construct, it is not an inevitable fact of life and can be changed - indeed we are seeing it change before our eyes with respect to the particular act of marriage. Legal capacity is being similarly reshaped from a disability standpoint, in a much more comprehensive way. The story of legal capacity is the story of law in people’s lives.

A blog in Scientific American reviews sleep’s role in "Obesity, Schizophrenia, Diabetes... Everything".  The article notes  a tight link between depression and sleep apnea,...

Drug profitability requires three parties to work together – drug companies to make the drugs, psychiatrists to prescribe them and consumers to take them. Too often, though, patients have failed to play nicely and do their bit. They have banged on about tiresome things like adverse reactions and alternative treatments, they have expressed foolish opposition to the very concept of pharmacotherapy and questioned its efficacy. They have become medication non-compliant and undermined the profits of the pharmaceutical industry and the authority of psychiatry. They have been bad and landed themselves on a lot of people’s naughty lists and made the World Health Organization very sad and worried.

Consumer Reports affirms that, though the use of antipsychotic drugs to treat conditions not approved by the Food and Drug Administration has increased significantly in the...

Seena Fazel from the University of Oxford Department of Psychiatry reviews The Bitterest Pills: The Troubling Story of Antipsychotic Drugs by Joanna Moncrieff for...

John Grohol of PsychCentral explains why, while "some well-meaning folks believe that all we need is 'better mental health treatment,' and suddenly we will...

Here is a short review of the Tim Murphy mental health bill. I show the research that was left out when the bill was written, how advocates can approach the issue, and what the main problem with ignoring the research will be.

The custody of Justina Pelletier, a Connecticut 15-year-old whose odyssey of diagnosis with "Somatoform Disorder" has trapped her in Boston Children's Hospital since last February, will...

In our last blog, we focused on the fact that nutrient supplementation has not only been accepted in the realm of physical health in the past, but it has actually been endorsed by reputable sources such as the Journal of the American Medical Association editors who published the Fairfield and Fletcher articles 11 years ago recommending that all adults take a multivitamin to reduce their risk of cardiovascular disease, cancer, and osteoporosis (note that this is completely inconsistent with very recent studies reported in the Annals of Internal Medicine --- but that’s just the way science works, using different nutrients and different methodologies, coming up with discrepant findings, until facts finally emerge).

Two pieces of research have been published over the last two years that should prompt a major reorientation of the treatment of schizophrenia and psychosis, and a fundamental reappraisal of the use of antipsychotic drugs in general. Put together, these studies suggest that the standard approach to treating serious mental health problems may cause more harm than good. Long-term treatment with antipsychotic drugs has adverse effects on the brain, and may impair rather than improve chances of recovery for some. Many people ask me how the psychiatric profession has responded to this data. Surely, they think, it must have stimulated a major debate within the profession, and some critical reflection about why it took so long to recognise these worrying effects? Sadly, this does not appear to be happening.

E. Fuller Torrey is one of the strongest proponents of outpatient commitment — the process of mandating individuals to take psychiatric drugs for extended periods of time after being released from a hospital setting. He accuses Robert Whitaker of ignoring the plight of the homeless “mentally ill” who he believes would be better served by the modern mental health system and forced psychiatric drug treatment. Recently, Representative Tim Murphy introduced legislation that would sharply increase outpatient mandatory treatment. Let's take a look at how those who are homeless and suffering severe emotional distress are generally treated in the community, and the reasons they may resist the "treatments" that this legislation would force them to submit to.

Heavy pot users were found to have working-memory deficits and associated changes in brain morphology that were consistent with changes found in persons with...

In the Netherlands, Lia graduated as a first grade teacher, but never went on to teach at school, in part because her Dutch degree...