“Forced Treatment is not the way: Opposing View”
Psychiatrist Dan Fisher's "opposing view" in USA Today makes the case — from a mental health perspective — against repealing the Affordable Care Act, which has...
“Recoil, Reform, Repeat”
For The Boston Globe, Michael Rezendes writes about the dehumanizing conditions for mental health patients and the Bridgewater State Hospital. While previous exposés have...
Escape from British Columbia
Rob Wipond reports on a constitutional challenge in British Columbia against a key component of the province’s Mental Health Act. “This case isn’t arguing...
Safety Analysis Weighs Harms and Benefits of Antipsychotic Drugs
The researchers find that the drug effects for reducing psychosis are small and that treatment failure and severe side effects are common.
“Gottesfeld Indicted for Alleged Cyber Attack on Hospital”
Martin Gottesfeld was charged in October in relation to the hacking of Boston Children’s Hospital in 2014 following the alleged mistreatment of one of...
“Liberty versus Need — Our Struggle to Care for People with Serious Mental Illness”
In an editorial for NEJM, Lisa Rosenbaum, MD, discusses the decision to use involuntary psychiatric commitment.
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The ACE Survey is Unusable Data
Do the effects of trauma matter more, or a person's ACE score? I think this is unusable data that harms people when you gather it. Here's why.
VA Hospitals Perform Worst on Inpatient Psychiatric Care
The results of the cross-sectional study show that U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) owned hospitals perform worst on most measures.
Study Finds High Risk for Suicide Following Psychiatric Hospitalization
Patients are at an increased risk for suicide during the three months immediately following discharge from an inpatient psychiatric hospital.
The Helping Room
Every culture has its share of individuals who break down in bewilderment. People who hallucinate, behave beyond norms, seek to die, think in strange ways.
Patients with OCD Prefer Psychotherapy
A new study in Psychiatric Services examines patient preferences for the myriad treatments available for Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)
“Medicating a Prophet”
In the New York Times Sunday Review, Irene Hurford, a psychiatrist, reflects on the ethics of forced treatment for psychosis. “As doctors,” she writes,...
The Mental Health Reform Act of 2016 (SB 2680) Would Be a Huge Step...
There is indeed a crisis in the mental health business. The crisis derives from psychiatry's spurious and self-serving premise that all significant problems of thinking, feeling, and/or behaving are brain illnesses that are correctable by psychiatric drugs.
Evolution or Revolution? Why Western Psychiatry Won’t Change by Incremental Steps
...but how realistic is it to expect that the biological skew of Western psychiatry can be sustainably changed one small step at a time?
“Canadian Patients Fight Forced Electroshock”
"A retired nurse, a Harvard-educated musician and others sued British Columbia this week, claiming it forcibly subjects mental health patients to electroconvulsive therapy and...
Ioannidis Questions Strength of Psychology and Neuroscience Literature
Last week, well-known Stanford scientist John Ioannidis and his colleague Denes Szucs released a new analysis online. They examined research published in eighteen prominent...
ECT Survivors Take On the FDA
In December, the FDA proposed down-classifying the device used in electroshock treatment (ECT), which would loosen regulations and potentially make ECT more widely available...
Clinton Releases Mental Health Plan
Today, Hillary Clinton’s campaign released their plan for addressing mental health care in the United States. The plan calls for a full integration of...
A Diluted Murphy Bill Clears the House and Goes to the Senate
Organized psychiatry, committed irrevocably and wholeheartedly to drug pushing and to their corrupt and corrupting relationship with pharma, simply will not countenance the fact that their primary product is fundamentally flawed and destructive. So they hire a PR company; they fund and lobby politicians; they parrot slogans; and they encourage one another to ever-increasing heights of self-congratulation. But they will not commission a definitive study to clarify and assess the scale of this problem once and for all. And the reason for this inaction is because they know that it would be bad for business. It would "cause a lot of people to stop taking their medications."
Life Lessons and Trauma Informed Care
My first real introduction to the world of madness and “mental illness” was when I was 21 years old and I left home to start my mental health nurse training. Reflecting on my own experiences has led me to consider how the trauma of participating in the psychiatric system can affect the way we care for others.
Lancet Study Questions Safety of Locked Psychiatric Wards
A new study published in Lancet Psychiatry challenges the common practice of locking psychiatric wards to prevent patients from attempting suicide or leaving against...
“Woman Hospitalized Involuntarily Wants Legal Aid for Mental Health Hearing”
A Canadian woman is attempting to assert her right to a lawyer in order to fight an involuntary psychiatric hospitalization. While homeless, the patient...
“Study Finds Mental Health Patients No Better Off Behind Locked Doors”
The Lancet Psychiatry published a study last week finding no benefit to locking up patients in mental health hospitals. Data on 145,000 patients found...
NPR: “Gun Violence And Mental Health Laws”
On NPR’s Morning Edition, Lauren Silverman debunks the assumption that mass shooters are usually ‘mentally ill,’ and that mental health policy can substitute for...
You Can Have Any Kind of Treatment You Want, Providing it’s Our Kind
Mental health nurse education supports institutional psychiatric practice in an insufficiently questioning way. Its formal curricula in universities are often undermined by the informal curricula of practice environments. As an institution, mental health nursing pays insufficient attention to both these issues because it is an arguably un-reflexive and rule-following discipline.