Don’t Let Barbie Out of the Glovebox – An OCD Account
It’s easy to cling to my diagnosis for comfort. In fact, externalizing obsessions the way you would an alien invasion or a metastasized tumor is a foundational part of OCD’s gold standard of treatment.
Psychiatric Drugs and Violence: What Can Genetics Tell Us? A Conversation With Selma Eikelenboom
Brooke Siem speaks with Selma Eikelenboom, together they explore what questions her research raises about the relationship between psychoactive drugs, genetic variation, and violence.
Getting Rid of the Pain Before Answering Its Questions: Psychiatry’s Damage to Self and...
By answering questions that pain asks, one can rediscover one’s true self. If you get rid of pain before you have answered its questions, you get rid of the self along with it.
From Efficacy to Non-Efficacy: Lessons from Pediatric Fluoxetine Trials
Modern studies find that fluoxetine has lost its efficacy for children and can now be considered clinically equivalent to placebo.
My $100,000 Life Sentence
One word turned my entire life upside down and nearly convinced me to end it. What was that one word? Borderline.
Soteria Model Linked to Lower Psychiatric Readmission Rates, Study Finds
The Soteria care model is an alternative to restrictive inpatient psychiatric care for people experiencing psychosis in which patients and service users stay in...
The ODDESSI: Open Dialogue, The Lancet, and a Trojan Horse
DESSI trial results provide a beginning for rethinking psychiatric care
Open Dialogue and ODDESSI: What Have We Learned?
I found Open Dialogue to be a compelling and deeply humane way of working but I also learned how hard it is to implement and sustain.
The Abyss and Beyond
Psilocybin seemed less interested in helping me avoid the abyss than in showing me that there was an entire landscape beyond it.
When Stopping Prescription Drugs Is Hard: Alicia Martin and the TaperMate Story
Alicia Martin is an Australian community pharmacist and the creator of an ingenious mobile app, TaperMate, which aims to help people with hyperbolic drug tapering and prescribed drug withdrawal.
Clancy’s Lawyer Blew the Chance for Lindsay to Go Free
If there is a second trial for Lindsay, I hope her lawyer puts a psychopharmacologist or neurotoxicologist on the stand.
Pharmaceutical Industry Corruption Is Structural, Systemic, and Profitable, New Review Finds
A new empirical review published in the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics reports that pharmaceutical industry corruption is a structural, industry-wide problem. Author...
What I Learned After Losing My Partner to Polypharmacy
I am left with questions that cannot be resolved retrospectively. Why were medications added without clear longitudinal review of cumulative exposure?
Remembering Dory Previn: An Interview by Peter Sterling in 1974
Dory Previn was an American lyricist, singer-songwriter, and poet whose deeply personal work explored her struggles with mental health, including experiences of psychosis. In October 1974, she met with neuroscientist Peter Sterling for a candid conversation about her psychiatric treatment.
ADHD UK Cannot Hide the Flawed Science Behind the Diagnosis and Its Treatment
The extensive critique of the biomedical account of ADHD and its treatment with stimulant medication has persisted for decades.
First-Person Knowledge and the Meanings of Madness: An Interview with Gail Hornstein
Psychologist Gail Hornstein discusses her search for the meanings of madness, from asylum artifacts and memoirs to the contemporary peer-support groups reshaping how people understand voices and visions.
The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations: Psychiatry’s Suppression of the Highly Capable
How many highly capable people are lost to a system that champions mediocrity as a necessary implication of mental illness?
When the Treatment Becomes Part of the Illness
Trusting the psychiatrists, I boarded a ship that would carry me on a decades-long and treacherous journey with psychiatric drugs.
My Mother Had to Be Dying Before Anyone Would Take Her Off the Drugs
On hospice, a psychiatrist finally said yes to deprescribing. Once someone is on hospice, taking medications away becomes the normal thing to do rather than the dangerous thing.
Mad Studies Is More Than Lived Experience: An Interview with Merrick Daniel Pilling
Pilling explains how Mad Studies moves from first-person knowledge to questions of sanism, psychiatric authority, mutual aid, and collective resistance.
Independent Evaluation Finds No Benefit to Coercion Under New York’s Kendra’s Law
Kendra’s Law is a New York State statute that allows courts to force people with “severe mental illness” into involuntary Assisted Outpatient Treatment (AOT)....
Antidepressants Can Change Peaceful Citizens into Killers
We must warn about the harms of antidepressants and bring people to justice who contribute to the suicides and homicides by lies and medical malpractice.
The West Doesn’t Have All the Answers: An Interview with Dinesh Bhugra
In this wide-ranging conversation on public mental health, psychiatrization, and community care, Dinesh Bhugra explains why meaningful lives, not symptom reduction alone, should guide mental healthcare today.
When Treatment Fails: Why I Relate to Lindsay Clancy
Despite her monstrous act, I can’t shake the feeling that Lindsay may have also suffered at the hands of a broken psychiatric system.
Unlearning Restraints: A Psychiatrist’s Journey from Patient to Practitioner
I had been the one whose fear was called dangerous, distorted into a label. Now I was on the other side, being asked to do it to someone else.
