My first encounter with the psychiatric system in America was at the age of 18. I spent my days crying — if not crying, I was thinking about how my presence in space and time was inherently burdening others. Not to mention, I was failing all my classes, and my GPA for my first semester of college was a measly .5 on the 4.0 scale. I was a failure. The breaking point was my 20th call to the national suicide hotline in three months; I had told the woman, while I sobbed, that I felt like a burden to everyone in my life and that I felt like I was not in my own body anymore. “Where is the counseling ..read more

From The Guardian: “It is a powerful fantasy, that we can excise all our vulnerability, trauma, need and dependency, that we will then be perfectly healed, stronger than before. It is also a very dangerous one. If we take the fantasy at face value, in all its concreteness, and we follow it through, we end up with lobotomies. In the first half of the 20th century, many neurologists believed that surgically removing part of the brain, or using a sharp instrument to cut the connections inside it, could heal their patients. What I have learned from my patients, and from my own therapy, is that thi ..read more

I hear the music again. It’s my mother singing through the clay earth from her grave the way she sang from her bed at the asylum until they shut her up. I move to the tune one thousand miles from her coffin, my body dipping this way and that as if I’m a hummingbird in one of her Fabergé eggs, forever bobbing at honeysuckle. My body stiffens. I’ve been betrayed by the sweetness she still conjures from her insulin-soaked life, those days doctors and nurses drowned her with sugar water until she fell into a coma. To calm her, they told my father. To make her normal. She poured her crystalline blo ..read more

A webinar presentation byKim Witczak, who serves as the consumer representation on the FDA’s psychopharmacologic advisory committee. In her talk, she tells of systemic flaws, shedding light on industry and regulatory priorities, and exposes the intricate web of influence driven by marketing agendas and profit motives, often unbeknownst to doctors and patients alike. See presentation here. Kim Witczak     The post America’s Drug Safety System is Broken appeared first on Mad In America ..read more

“It seemed to me that all language is an excess of language” —Samuel Beckett As an urban community mental health therapist, part of my job is meeting with new intakes and completing their comprehensive assessment—their first step in getting connected to a primary therapist and psychiatrist, and a document they’ll need if they apply for any special programs. The role always gives me anxiety, because I never know what I’ll get—except, of course, paperwork. Recently, I had an intake come in with the records from all his previous psychiatry treatment—a thick stack, easily 300 pages. He seemed to t ..read more

From Star Tribune: “Movies such as ‘Erin Brockovich’ depict whistleblowers as heroes who undergo tough times before earning the satisfaction that they’ve benefited humanity. University of Minnesota philosophy professor Carl Elliott says that’s not how it usually goes down. Elliott, whose book ‘The Occasional Human Sacrifice’ is out next week, knows from experience. Alerted by a 2008 series of articles in the Pioneer Press, written by Paul Tosto and Jeremy Olson (now a Star Tribune reporter), he and others investigated after the suicide of Dan Markingson, a mentally ill man who was part of a U ..read more

From The New Yorker: “In ‘DSM: A History of Psychiatry’s Bible‘ (2021), the medical sociologist Allan V. Horwitz presents reasons for the DSM-5’s botched revolution, including infighting among members of the working groups and the sidelining of clinicians during the revision process. But there’s a larger difficulty: revamping the DSM requires destroying kinds of people. As the philosopher Ian Hacking observed, labelling people is very different from labelling quarks or microbes. Quarks and microbes are indifferent to their labels; by contrast, human classifications change how ‘indivi ..read more

The words that follow in this essay come from my own personal reflections as someone who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia and who has experienced psychosis many times throughout life. Therefore, I would like the reader to know that these thoughts are based on my own beliefs and experiences and are not necessarily based on verifiable objective facts. Even from a scientific perspective, though, there is still much about schizophrenia and psychosis that we do not understand. The scientific study of these kind of phenomena is not as well established and understood as the study of most other a ..read more

A new study from Copenhagen University Hospital offers a rare glimpse into the personal experiences of six individuals as they navigate the complex process of tapering their antipsychotic medications. The research reveals not only the varied outcomes—varying from complete cessation to ongoing treatment—but also underscores a profound increase in personal empowerment and emotional insight regardless of the tapering results. The study followed six people who were attempting to discontinue the use of antipsychotics. Two of them succeeded in altogether discontinuing the medication, while two ..read more

In 1999, New York State passed the first Assisted Outpatient Treatment (AOT) law, which creates a regime of civil courts to force psychiatric interventions on those found to have “serious and persistent mental illness” who “struggle to engage voluntarily” with care. As of 2023, such laws were on the books in 47 states and the District of Columbia—leaving just Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Maryland as holdouts. In these three states, coalitions of psychiatric survivors, harm reductionists, peer advocates, disability rights advocates, and civil rights attorneys have fended off multi-year effor ..read more