Essays

The poster-children of psychiatric genetics, who endured abuse throughout their lives, were also the product of a racist culture.

Psychiatry has acknowledged its history of racism, but can they ever acknowledge that the entire edifice is built on fundamental bigotry?

A new study finds that those with mild distress are three times as likely to feel worse after therapy than to receive some benefit.

As contacts to the new 988 suicide hotline number have risen, so have call tracing and police interventions.

If the Brackeen v. Halland case is successful, Native children are more likely to be placed with non-Native foster parents, and face a surge in psychiatric labeling and drugging.

The research literature from the WHO, NIMH, and others does not support a narrative of therapeutic progress, of psychiatric treatments that have “continued” to improve over time.

To strip psychedelic use down to its chemicals is to de-radicalize its communal and anti-authoritarian roots. Given psychiatry’s history of treatment outcome failure and its ethically compromising financial relationships with Big Pharma, is it really a good idea to make psychiatry the societal authority in charge of psychedelic use?

Respondents described the grief and rage associated with being socially isolated while healing from childbirth and caring for a newborn, in some cases, entirely on their own.

Harrow's research over the years told of how long-term antipsychotic use is associated with worse outcomes, even after controlling for psychosis severity.

How did that young Puerto Rican girl who very much disliked seeing a therapist when locked up in the juvenile system end up working in the mental health field as an adult?

Now I’m under attack, with threats of violence flung at me alongside threats of lawsuits. And all because I shared the large body of peer-reviewed research that contradicts the mainstream assumptions of psychiatry.

Leading figures in psychiatry acknowledge that DSM psychiatric diagnoses and the chemical imbalance theory of mental illness are not scientifically valid, but are useful fictions that help people manage their emotions and comply with their medication treatments.

Psychiatry's defenders are open to criticism of psychiatry as long as it stops short of acknowledging the increasingly well-documented reality that psychiatry lacks any scientific merit.

Unbiased experts must examine the claims and research of psychiatry and issue a report as to whether psychiatry not only has a valid medical basis, but whether this basis justifies the widespread violation of medical ethics and the routine use of imprisonment and torture.

After Joanna Moncrieff and colleagues published their study debunking the low-serotonin theory of depression, the editor of Mad in Sweden, Lasse Mattila, wrote Sweden’s...

Service-users' experience was at the heart of everything the critics spoke about, as well as the importance of relying on the most up-to-date and accurate evidence.

Even those who would seek to reform the profession of psychiatry cannot confront the reality that exists in the research literature

For decades, psychiatry committed medical fraud when it told the public that antidepressants fixed a chemical imbalance in the brain.

I will begin with a story of my youth. Then I will explore what my life has looked like since my release from custody. Finally, I will offer my own perspective on the country’s problems with gun violence, articulated from my unique positionality.

Sexual abuse is inevitable, an unspoken and largely invisible tragedy that affects most, if not all, inmates who enter into any detention center, especially a so-called “mental hospital.”

A dialogue between Jim Phelps and Robert Whitaker about Nassir Ghaemi's latest article, which concluded that psychiatric drugs, except for lithium, do not provide a long-term benefit.

You had better be able to back up what you say with enough force to overcome any opposition; this rule applies to both inmates and staff.

A dialogue between Dr. Jim Phelps—a psychiatrist who questions whether MIA is doing more harm than good by reporting the results of long-term trials of psychiatric drugs—and Robert Whitaker, founder of MIA.

In the detention center, there is really no better tool to overcome the constant threat of death than equanimity. Meditation was my antidote to hopelessness.

In his new book, former NIMH director Thomas Insel, while exploring the causes of poor mental health outcomes in the United States, omits any mention of NIMH studies that tell of how the drugs worsen long-term outcomes.