In his the Future Patient Blog, David Gilbert writes : “I am no big fan of mental health awareness days (see here ). The ‘awareness industry’ should be more about ‘understanding’ what people go through in terms of sense of pain, choice,…
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Dougal Shaw for the BBC reports : “The school playground can be a lonely place for a child if they haven’t got anyone to play with. But a special type of bench is helping pupils make friends and get people talking…
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This article by Robert Whitaker in the May 2011 edition of Psychology Today is well worth reading, despite it being published over seven years ago. Subtitled “Should reports from the NIMH’s STAR*D trial be retracted?”, it begins: “For some time now,…
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In my own odyssey through this valley of shadows I have mulled over three approaches – between them, they offer a pathway to a wider societal cure. The Guardian article below is from Mark Rice-Oxley, author of Underneath the Lemon Tree: A Memoir of Depression and Recovery : “It’s become…
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The publishers ( PCCS Books , 2016) of Searching for a Rose Garden describe it as “an incisive critique of all that is unhelpful about sanestream understandings of and responses to mental distress. Drawing on world-wide survivor activism and scholarship, it explores…
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The video below comes from the 17th Annual Conference of the International Society for Ethical Psychology and Psychiatry, held November 14-17, 2014 in Los Angeles, California. Each of the invited speakers was asked to present his or her proposal to…
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Martin Seager is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist with Change, Grow, Live , and Branch Consultant with the Central London Samaritans. He has written: “… Over the last 30 years, like many others I have been dismayed by the persistence of what is often…
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Why some people experience extreme mood states and what can help. ‘I have often asked myself whether, given the choice, I would choose to have manic depressive illness … Strangely enough I think I would choose to have it. It’s…
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Why people sometimes hear voices, believe things that others find strange, or appear out of touch with reality … and what can help. “An individual having unusual difficulties in coping with his environment struggles and kicks up the dust, as…
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The placebo effect is weirder and potentially more useful than we imagined. Harvard medicine professor Ted Kaptchuk is at the bleeding edge of a radical new treatment in medicine: giving patients pills that don’t work. “Our patients tell us it’s…
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