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I am humbled to share with you my life’s journey, and more importantly to convey a recent experience that has transmuted everything, opening up a new frontier of being more fully alive. I am beginning to see the invisible; or should I say I am beginning to feel it, because it is an inner experience.

I just wanted to do a brief followup on my last blog post about my latest psychotic break adventure. I am a recent Psychonaut exploring the inner workings of the mind, and finding out what was my reality versus Consensus reality. I am starting to come out of the experience. It is like waking from a dream. Questioning one's self is a standard part of this process of coming back to consensus reality — at least for me. It's good to reconsider some of the conclusions I've come to in the last month or so, when some of my inputs may have not been a part of consensus reality. But I'm getting stronger.

I was recently surfing the internet and came across an Etsy ad selling a lobotomy tool set - hammer and orbitoclast. I was tempted to make the purchase and indulge my penchant for this historical “apparatus” especially given its rise as heroic therapeutic intervention for three decades. It was a mere $168.00. Although I didn’t buy the historical torture device, that ad left me with one penetrating realization: psychiatry is here to stay.

Lucy Costa is deputy executive director of a non-profit service user rights-based organization in Toronto, Canada. She works as an advocate promoting the rights...

Lucy Costa was born to Azorean parents who immigrated to Toronto, Canada in the early seventies. She is deputy executive director of a non-profit...

While the following list of political abuses of U.S. psychiatry and psychology begins with the infamous Project MKUltra and recent American Psychological Association torture scandal, this should not be taken to imply that these more sensational abuses are the more important than the everyday political abuse of U.S. psychiatry and psychology to stigmatize and disempower groups, enable dehumanizing institutions, compel compliance, marginalize dissent, depoliticize, and maintain the status quo.

Yesterday, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) released an editorial entitled “Confluence, Not Conflict of Interest: Name Change Necessary.” The authors argue that the phrase “conflict of interest is pejorative,” and a better term “would be confluence of interest, implying an alingnment of primary and secondary interests.”

In a Sunday newspaper in 2001, Mary read an article entitled ‘The Doctor, who won’t do Drugs.' It was written to mark the publication of a new book ‘Beyond Prozac’ by Limerick-based Dr. Terry Lynch. In our co-authored book, ‘Soul Survivor - A Personal Encounter with Psychiatry’, Mary describes her first meeting with Terry. “I was so inspired and encouraged by the article and the book that I wanted to thank him personally. I managed to locate his phone number and spoke to him for the first time. I subsequently met him a number of times and the enthusiasm and sincerity of the man were like a good tonic. From the word go, he believed in me as a survivor just as much as I believed in him as a professional and above all as a good thinker, someone who didn’t take things at face value and had the courage of his convictions. He listened to me, encouraged me and his great understanding of the psychiatric system greatly helped me."

On April 25, 2014, Jeffrey Lieberman, MD, then-President of the APA, announced that the association had engaged the services of Porter Novelli, a prestigious PR company based in Washington DC and currently operating in 60 different countries. I expressed the belief at the time that it would take a lot more than some PR embellishments to remediate the fundamental flaws in American psychiatry's concepts and practices. In the intervening year and a half, I've been watching the APA closely for any indications of fundamental change; any hint of critical self-appraisal; any suggestion of genuine reform or remediation. But I've seen nothing of this sort. It's still the same old APA, with its same old spurious diagnoses, and the same old assurances that their "treatments" are efficacious and safe, and that the great neurological insights are just around the corner.

Toppmøte is Norwegian for ‘summit,’ and Toppmøte2015 is the second of two very successful seminars bringing together professionals, academics, and policymakers with citizens, voters and users of services – under the aegis of the Norwegian ‘Nasjonalt senter for erfaringskompetanse innen psykisk helse’ or “National Centre for Knowledge through Experience in Mental Health.” That’s a rather wonderful organisation, funded by the Norwegian government, which ensures that the experience of people who have used mental health services is reflected in the commissioning, design, management and evaluation of those services.

This past Saturday, I was on my way back from Europe to Boston, and while on a stop in Iceland, I checked my email and was directed to a new blog by Ronald Pies in Psychiatric Times, in which he once again revisited the question of whether American psychiatry, and the American Psychiatric Association (APA), ever promoted the idea that chemical imbalances caused mental disorders. And just like when I read his 2011 writings on this subject, I found myself wondering what to make of his post. Why was he so intent on maintaining psychiatry’s “innocence?” And why did it matter?

It's no secret that at the present time, psychiatry is reeling under a barrage of scrutiny and criticism. Their long-standing contention that all significant problems of thinking, feeling, and/or behaving are brain illnesses "just like diabetes," which need to be "treated" with drugs and high-voltage electric shocks to the brain, has been thoroughly discredited. And yet they go on peddling their spurious, self-serving ideology and the products of their pharma partners. The great mystery in all of this is why has the mainstream media been so slow to pick up the story.

People hassle me for being anti-medication, and I always tell them I am NOT anti-medication; I am pro-fully-informed choice. But people like things black-and-white. They see me as being against medications, and so I'm telling you why medications may have saved my life yesterday, or at least saved me a whole bunch more trouble.

Kit Riley is an Australian artist and writer. Kit creates pervasive life/art projects about madness, work and language in an attempt to reimagine communicative...

I imagine that everybody on this side of the issue knows by now that the eminent psychiatrist Jeffrey Lieberman, MD, Chief Psychiatrist at Columbia, and past President of the APA, called Robert Whitaker "a menace to society." The grounds for Dr. Lieberman's vituperation were that Robert had dared to challenge some of psychiatry's most sacred tenets! But in all the furor, it was largely ignored that in the same interview Dr. Lieberman had said something else that warrants additional discussion.

Probiotics have certainly become quite the rage across the world for the treatment of all kinds of ailments from irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) to infectious diarrhoea to stress to low mood. Some might say that the enthusiasm has been rather slow to develop. Recently, the popular press has propagated the idea that probiotics are the next antidepressants.

A shock wave hit American psychology this past July when news surfaced in the New York Times that the American Psychological Association (APA) “engaged in activity that would constitute collusion with the Bush administration to promote, support or facilitate the use of "enhanced" interrogation techniques by the United States in the war on terror.” The APA quickly responded. At its annual convention held in Toronto the next month, the APA Council of Representatives did the right thing and voted to bar psychologists from participating in national security interrogations. There were lots of mea culpas, praise for the whistleblowers, and vows of future transparency and “never again.”

If you looked at photos of Luke Montagu in the grounds of Mapperton, his stunning ancestral manor, you might well envy his lot. Look closer and you’ll sense that his story has not always been one of wine and roses, for the next Lord Sandwich has spent most of the last seven years in hell, thanks to the interventions of drug-obsessed psychiatrists. Yet, though his experience was heartbreaking, often terrifying, it is now becoming a story full of hope and resilience, of grace and grit, for he has co-founded the Council for Evidence-based Psychiatry as his contribution to the information war on the false or misleading claims made about the benefits of psychotropic drugs.

Most of the movies I've seen which feature psychiatrists portray them as concerned, empathetic listeners, working diligently to help clients disentangle or resolve some life crisis: a portrayal, incidentally, which is in marked contrast to the reality of the 15-minute, drug-pushing med-check. No amount of mental gymnastics or PR can address psychiatry's fundamental flaws.

In the last couple of weeks, I've read two articles in which the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) is described as being the “largest organization representing people living with serious mental illness.” Putting aside (for the moment) my issues with the use of blanket ‘mental illness’ terminology; since exactly when did they become a group that represents people who have been so labeled in any genuine sort of way? Until our voices are seen as having equal value and are given equal space, those that do not understand and lack insight into our experiences (whether they possess good intent or not) will continue to be the ones to define our past, present and future in the public eye.

I think we need to posit a meta-autonomy and meta-equality as being principles of natural law. To say "meta" here means that we do not have to adhere to traditional western constructions of the self and state - both legal fictions - but to go beyond them to what we actually value without thinking that everyone has to be the same as white non-disabled heterosexual males in order for our perspectives, our choices, our contributions and our claims and criticisms to be valid and for us to have standing in the social order.

In this truly remarkable — and meticulously researched — volume, Dr. Lynch annihilates psychiatry's cherished chemical imbalance theory of depression. Every facet of this theory, which the author correctly calls a delusion, is critically analyzed and found wanting. Please read Depression Delusion, keep it close to hand for reference, and encourage others to read it also. Ask your library to buy a copy. The spurious chemical imbalance theory is now so widely accepted that it will take enormous efforts to dislodge it. In any debate on this matter, Dr. Lynch's book will, quite literally, put the facts at your fingertips.

Marijuana is now legal in two states, and legal for medical use in 23 states and the District of Columbia. Polls show the majority of Americans support cannabis legalization, and more and more of the country is joining the legalization trend. As a counselor working with people diagnosed with psychosis and mental illness I am often asked about my opinion and clinical experience — as well as my personal experience — with medical cannabis.

One cannot be with other individuals without encountering their belief systems at some point. My work with individuals in locked in patient units, mental health clinics and the Los Angeles Jails has brought me into close contact with people who had diverse belief systems, some of which were cultural and life-long, others were trauma-induced or influenced by drugs and alcohol. These experiences taught me to approach belief systems without prejudice and with open receptivity to their meaning and importance to the person.

On a beautiful Vermont summer week-end, about 40 people – social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, administrators, and people with lived experience among us – gathered together. Our purpose: To come together and model what many of us had experienced in Europe at the International Meetings for the Treatment of Psychosis.