Rethinking Psychiatry/Medical Model

In The Psychologist, Vaughan Bell of Mind Hacks and John Cromby debate how we ascribe meanings and values to the biological elements of psychological...

BrainBlogger has an interview with Gary Greenberg, psychotherapist and author of The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry. "The (Diagnostic...

The Lancet Psychiatry's December issue includes two letters commenting on Mary Boyle and Lucy Johnstone's article, "Alternatives to psychiatric diagnosis," along with a new...

In a call for submissions posted on the History of Madness in Canada website, the long-running OUR VOICE / NOTRE VOIX magazine, publisher of...

Critical Psychiatry mentions the upcoming Sedgwick Conference, and links to a retrospective appraisal by two British academics of the central ideas in Peter Sedgwick's...

In many respects it is difficult to fault the report Understanding Psychosis and Schizophrenia, recently published by the British Psychological Society (BPS) and the Division of Clinical Psychology (DCP)[i]; indeed, as recent posts on Mad in America have observed, there is much to admire in it. Whilst not overtly attacking biomedical interpretations of psychosis, it rightly draws attention to the limitations and problems of this model, and points instead to the importance of contexts of adversity, oppression and abuse in understanding psychosis. But the report makes only scant, fleeting references to the role of cultural differences and the complex relationships that are apparent between such differences and individual experiences of psychosis.

PsyBlog reviews a recent study that found people who feel depressed are more effective and efficient than others at certain types of activities. "The researchers...

The International Society for Ethical Psychology and Psychiatry had the clout to draw a stellar line-up of presenters to its recent conference, including internationally prominent critics like David Healy, Peter Gøtzsche, Robert Whitaker and Allen Frances. There were lots of learnings and even some tense discussions, but one of the most intriguing aspects of the entire conference was the way in which scientific and social issues became deeply intertwined, especially when presenters reached for better pathways forward.

In the The Atlantic, journalist Ric Morin explores alternative perspectives on and approaches to schizophrenic and psychotic experiences through a lengthy interview with psychiatrist...

Editor's Note: At the Mad in America film festival, Allen Frances, M.D., who was the chairman of the DSM IV task force, participated on a panel of psychiatrists who were asked to respond to the themes explored at the festival and to offer their own critiques of psychiatry. After the festival, he wrote a blog for the Huffington Post, which was partially inspired by his participation at the festival, and he then offered to re-publish it on MIA. It appears below. Also at the festival, Justin Brown sought to hand out a leaflet criticizing Dr. Frances’ writings, as well as his critique of those who criticize psychiatry. We asked him to submit a post for MIA instead, which is published below.

Allen Frances recently wrote a Huffington Post blog that made some good points about advocate compromise, but used some very insulting language and therefore made an inaccurate assessment of the problem. He is asking the mental health advocates to end a "civil war." I am making the point instead, that it's not a civil war.  Dr. Frances is trying to get two ends of the bell curve together instead of addressing issues in the middle of the bell curve. In the middle, it's people who know the science trying to educate people who don't know the science.

I was honored to both attend and participate in the recent Mad In America Film Festival. I was asked to join a panel of psychiatrists who were asked to respond to the themes and questions explored in the festival. What follows are a lightly edited version of my remarks.

Boston.com has published an article about the Mad In America Film Festival, running through this weekend in Medford, Massachusetts. "Making people rethink psychiatry —...

Mad Matters, a Canadian collection of writings by psychiatric survivors, anti-psychiatry activists, academics (including MIA Blogger Bonnie Burstow) and others who take critical approaches...

An op-ed in The Advertiser begins with a quote from Carl Jung: “The foundation of mental illness is our unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.”...

Our culture promotes "fitting in" through "normality" as an ultimate ideal that all "disordered" people should strive to attain, and yet at the same...

With less than three weeks to go before the start of Alternatives 2014, I feel inspired to write about why the Alternatives conference is important to the c/s/x movement for social justice and why we at the National Mental Health Consumers’ Self-Help Clearinghouse feel honored to organize this year’s conference.

Recently I wrote an article on MIA entitled Trauma, Psychosis, and Dissociation. Several people responded privately with some very thought-provoking questions that I would like to explore and possibly answer to some extent here. Dedicated readers of the MIA website are all too familiar with the myriad problems that exist with diagnoses in general, the stereotypical (and often untrue) assumptions associated with these various categories, and their lack of scientific validity or reliability. First, though, I want to state that my area of experience and research is with trauma, psychosis, and dissociation . . .

Even if The Lancet's attempts to forge a new vision in response to the crisis of confidence in medical psychiatry work (previously reported in...

Daniel Helman had a psychotic episode at age 20, but has been off all psychiatric medications since 2006 and is now 44. In Schizophrenia...

If there is one downside to the field of mental health, declares an editorial in The Lancet Psychiatry, "it is the failure of pleasant,...

In an article published by the Treatment Advocacy Center, The Shortage of Public Hospital Beds for Mentally Ill Persons, the authors (D. J. Jaffe and E. Fuller Torrey) present the idea that we have far too few hospital beds in this country, and because of that there has been a dramatic shift towards the diversion of people labeled with mental illness into prisons and homelessness. Their answer to this issue is that we should radically increase the amount of hospital beds and we should also dramatically increase our reliance on outpatient treatment in the form of mandated involuntary medication programs. As many people know here, the TAC has been highly influential politically and the authors of this paper have been instrumental in getting laws passed that mandate the outpatient use of psychiatric drugs for people who have been civilly committed.

When the American psychiatrist Thomas Szasz killed himself a year and a half ago at the age of 92, I thought there would be a global outpouring in psychiatric circles of sympathy or scorn. Instead, his death was largely met with silence, a silence as deafening as the one that attended the second half of his long, prolific, and polemical career. Szasz’ name didn’t show up at all in the APA program last year, and this presentation of mine is apparently the only one to mention him this year. This silent treatment has, ironically enough, and surely against his will, forced him to fulfill the ancient Epicurean ambition to live and die unnoticed.

My very good friend Marcia Meyers of Portland, Oregon is one of the most powerful leaders I have seen in my nearly 40 years of activism in the little-known movement for deep change in the mental health industry. She joined my amazing wife Debra, some friends and me for a backyard party at our Eugene home this summer and brought to my attention an issue that deserves a larger audience. Marcia’s story riveted me because it involves activism, madness, psychiatric torture of her beloved daughter, Unitarianism, secret poisoned-pen letters, Scientology and global warming!

One of the most remarkable aspects of Robert Whitaker’s (2010) outstanding book Anatomy of an Epidemic was his comparative data that contrasted outcomes for mental disorders prior to the introduction of pharmacological treatments with outcomes for mental disorders after pharmacological treatments became the main, and often only, course of action. I have asked people in workshops to estimate who might be better off – someone diagnosed with what we now call bipolar disorder prior to the introduction of lithium or someone diagnosed after lithium became a standard treatment. Almost without exception workshoppers estimate that the people diagnosed before lithium was available do much worse. Whitaker’s data indicate exactly the opposite. It’s a staggering finding.