Art, Poetry, and Humor Galleries
View the artwork, poetry, and humor galleries and submit your work. Or visit the Arts Corner.
Floodgates by Miles Harrop
The Trouble with Lived Experience: When Peer Support Compounds Trauma by Denying Abuse
Trauma and abuse are different experiences, and they require different forms of support, accountability, and healing.
Brain Disorders or Problems with Living? How Research on “Mental Illness” Went Awry
Is it time to consider the possibility that the entire field is a failed enterprise, a wrong turn in human history?
Becoming Stewards of Shadow: Beyond Great Men and Myths of Invention
Before the psyche was carved into parts with elegant diagrams and marketed methods, cultures walked with shadow.
The Degrees on the Wall
The therapists who helped me most weren’t the ones who dazzled with their knowledge. They were the ones who made me feel less alone.
Mad in Puerto Rico
Since Puerto Rico is, in essence, a colony of the United States, colonialism has a heavy impact on mental health and the healthcare system.
The Whispered Rules of Belonging: How Counseling Education Tried to Silence Me
I started to understand that I wasn’t just being trained in therapeutic skills. I was being trained to conform.
RESEARCH STUDIES
Emma Burris from Barnard College is seeking participants for a survey on the direct lived experience of former adolescent psychiatric inpatients, with the goal of improving mental healthcare in a way that’s sensitive to service users’ experiences. Find out more about the project and complete the survey here.
- July 21, 2025, 12:00 pm: Alternatives to Suicide Overview
- July 28, 2025, 1:00 pm: Hyperbolic tapering tips: Barriers and enablers with Mark Horowitz, MBBS, PhD
- July 29, 2025, 12:30 pm: Stolen Lives Picnic
- July 31, 2025, N/A: Mad Camp California
- August 10, 2025, 1:00 pm: Polyphonic Voices: Exploring Contexts, Listening to Lived Experiences, and Holding Collective Faith in One Another
Psychiatry Criticism Politics: When the Enemy of Your Enemy Is Not Your Friend
Those who would like to abolish psychiatry in order to replace it with their own coercive, authoritarian policies are not friends.
“I Made it Through the Horrors of Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal” A Conversation with Comedian...
Dex Carrington, AKA Jørgen Kjønø, is a Norwegian-American stand-up comedian and actor. He joins us on the Mad In America podcast to talk about his experience with Lyrica and Zyprexa, including a five-and-a-half-year taper after 10 years on the drugs.
ChatGPT Weakens Your Ability to Think, MIT Study Finds
“This cognitive offloading phenomenon raises concerns about the long-term implications for human intellectual development and autonomy,” the researchers write.
Why Psychosis Is Not So Crazy: A Conversation with Stijn Vanheule
Vanheule urges clinicians to listen for the structure in psychotic thought. He offers clinical examples that reframe hallucinations as a form of creative response to unspeakable dilemmas.
Antipsychotics Do Not Provide a Clinically Meaningful Benefit Over the Short-Term: A Review of...
70 years of RCTs fail to provide evidence that antipsychotics provide a clinically meaningful benefit for treating acute psychotic episodes.
Veterans Take Their “War Cry For Change” to Capitol Hill
Despite VHA’s $571 million suicide prevention budget, veterans are dying by suicide at alarmingly high rates. Advocates want answers and accountability.
When care becomes violence – psychiatry’s repressed responsibility
In Swedish psychiatry, the blame for failures in care is often placed on the patients themselves - not on the system's own shortcomings. Diagnoses such as borderline are used to explain away abuse, neglect and violations in the name of care. In this opinion piece, psychiatric survivor Cat W highlights the need for a real shift in perspective: from symptoms of illness to an understanding of society and trauma. See the article here:
Clarifying and useful: About Divergence
Both divergent and everyone else may need help understanding human play and life, writes Mad in Norway's book reviews. She praises Jonas Vennike Ditlevsen (pictured) for providing insight into the unspoken patterns of social interaction and communication.
Trauma is always political: A comparative look at PTSD and cPTSD
"Affective disorders are captured forms of discontent that must be externalized and addressed to their real cause: capital."
