Giving Caregivers a Platform: Sam, Husband of Ka’ryn Marie
For many caregivers who assist their loved ones, the journey involves navigating the medical system and its many challenges. This time, the journey takes...
My Sister Lucy’s Death and Life: Picturing an Alternate Timeline of Recovery
I’ll never forget standing beside my sister Lucy as she was strapped to a gurney during a midnight admission to an E.R. in Cambridge, Mass.
‘The Invisible Cage Called Freedom’: My Work, My Kids, My Mental Health
I
see my 3-year-old’s innocent smile as she plays and rides her tricycle, and I can’t help but feel sad and worried about my daughters’...
Critical Psychiatry Textbook, Chapter 8: Depression and Mania (Affective Disorders) (Part Eight)
Researchers have again and again demonstrated that depression pills double suicides both in children and adults.
Children Are Vulnerable Cogs in the Psychiatric Machine
My guardian decided to seek out “professional” advice about how to diminish my “outbursts.” I was perceived as a problem that needed to be extinguished into a compliant state.
Changing Brains, Changing Minds: Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal and the Marital Relationship
As family support people for those caught in the mental health system, our job is to mitigate as much of the trauma as we can.
State Hospital Memories: More of My Story
The Detroit Free Press did an excellent job in bringing to light the conditions at Pontiac, its loss of accreditation, and closing. Still, they didn't quite grasp the severity of violence there.
The Medicalization of the American Mind
One cause of fragility? Pathologizing our children with psychiatric diagnoses and focusing on a medical solution to life's problems.
Listen to the Victims: Senate Holds Hearing on Guardianship
I have seen the exploitation wreaked by court-appointed guardians. It is up to us to use our voices for those who cannot speak out.
To Promote Mental Health, We Must Teach It
When we are quick to pathologize suffering, yet do not provide the fundamentals for healthy living, it is inhumanity of the highest order.
Abused by Psychiatrists After a BPD Misdiagnosis
If you don't realize that you are autistic, your intellectual, sensory, social, and emotional differences are a mystery, even to you.
Emotional Crisis Response: The Peer-Run Respite/Soteria House Approach Compared to the Conventional Approach
The peer respite/Soteria house model responds to emotional crisis with compassion and curiosity, rather than pathologizing.
One Pill To Disrupt: Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal and the Marital Relationship
The suicidality that accompanies akathisia is the natural human impulse to escape being tortured. To save my wife, the woman I love, I was forced to argue for her continued torture.
What’s Missing from NAMI and Pro-Psychiatry: Lived Experience
Since many psych patients become forced consumers, their advocates have a duty to be educated and concerned with adverse reactions.
Beyond Labels and Meds—Closer Look: Isabella Castillo
At times I tend to feel invisible. Sometimes I don’t feel like I fit in with everyone else; I feel like an outsider.
Beyond Psychiatry: A Trauma-Centric View of Mental Health
Internal family systems therapy is a non-pathologizing method of working toward healing from trauma, a journey of returning to wholeness by reconnecting with ourselves.
Beyond Labels and Meds—Closer Look: Madeline Aliah
Meet another talented teen behind the pieces in MIA's art exhibition. She writes: "This poem was written in my first year at a queer-positive school and is processing the new forms of guilt and shame I experienced and was exposed to."
One Flew Over the Scientific Consensus’ Nest—The Story of Dr. Ophir and ADHD
The backlash against Dr. Yaakov Ophir, licensed clinical psychologist and promising scholar, began when he reported his findings about the scientific validity of ADHD.
Beyond Labels and Meds—Closer Look: Aurora Ramos
Meet another talented teen behind the pieces in MIA's art exhibition, who says: "I think art is underrated sometimes because of its seemingly uselessness, but I highly believe it can cure many minds."
Beyond Labels and Meds—Closer Look: HoJin Kwak
This is the first of 4 spotlight interviews with some of the talented youth behind the pieces in MIA's art exhibition. HoJin states: "The original idea for my drawing started with the brain. The complexity of its sudden twists and curves fascinates me."
Breaking the Cycle: How I Overcame Intergenerational Trauma and Became a Peer Advocate
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?
Problem-Solving Through Skills-Building: Motivating Kids to Change
Children can overcome all sorts of difficulties by learning specific behavioural or emotional skills with the help and support of their social network.
The Bipolar Rollercoaster: Looking Beyond the Labels
Removing assumptions evoked by my family member’s diagnoses has transformed my understanding of their experience and increased my ability to arrive at solutions applicable to their expressed needs.
Dubious Science: Downplaying the Risks of Antidepressants in Pregnancy
When popular websites, such as Johns Hopkins and the Mayo Clinic, downplay the possible risks of antidepressant use in pregnancy, they are ignoring the evidence.
Shedding the Limits of “Severe Mental Illness” Labels
When people seeking help are relegated to “the Other,” how can they ever form a “therapeutic alliance”? Without collaboration, treatment devolves into coercion and oppression. We must change our language and relationships so new narratives can be born.