Essays

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.

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

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?

Thomas Jobe was a collaborator in a longitudinal study that upended conventional thinking about antipsychotics. He died March 16.

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.”

Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder (HPPD) is one of the after-effects neglected amid the rapid march of the psychedelic renaissance. But is the impulse to pathologise these perceptual changes helpful?

As mainstream mental health ideas and approaches are increasingly incorporated by community resilience-building groups, critics warn about the dangers of pathologizing and medicalizing reactions to climate change.

Sean Gunderson, who was detained by the criminal justice system for 17 years after receiving an NGRI verdict, documents the life of a forensic psychiatry inmate.

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?

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.

All the new hype about miracle psychedelic treatments as the next wave of cures for mental disorders leaves out the risk of therapy abuse.

Stories of a state hospital leader who challenged the mental health system by placing patients as the most important people: Dr. Dean K. Brooks of Oregon State Hospital.

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.

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.

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...

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

How the unrelated murder of an inmate on another unit led to Sean's transfer, his escape from forced medication, and eventually, his release.

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.

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.

Being stuck in the custody of a malicious treatment team could mean death. I had to resort to the Mother of All Tactics Hegemony (a lawsuit).

Life in the DC was far too complicated for me to be able to just listen to my body and sleep on a thick yoga mat placed on the floor to alleviate my severe back pain.

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.

A TV writer claims that research shows that Tetris is “literally a trauma first aid kit.” Her tweets sound scientific, but the research behind it is unconvincing.