Thinking differently about mental health

The Philadelphia Association (PA) (see eg. previous post ) was originally founded by R.D. Laing and others in 1965 to relieve "mental i...

Daniel Cohrs & Awais Aftab ( 2025 ) provide a useful overview of the heterogeneity and debate within critical psychiatry and adjacent mo...

The recent Channel 4 programme ‘The great ADHD myth?’ has highlighted how the ADHD community feels under attack (see previous post ). This c...

I was critical of Max Pemberton in a previous post for what he said in one of his Daily Mail  columns. But he has fronted what I think is q...

‘The great ADHD myth?’ will screen on channel 4 next Tuesday 18th August. This is despite a threat from ADHD UK (see mention in  previous po...

As described by The Times  (see report ), Uta Frith has an article in Psychological Medicine  entitled ‘Autism spectrum disorder: Has it lo...

Heritability of mental disorder is a difficult concept to understand. For example, it is commonly said that the heritability of schizophreni...

At its worst, psychiatry treats patients as needing their brains cured. People may be considered by psychiatry to have a brain abnormality w...

Andrew A. Nierenberg in an editorial in Psychiatric Annals defends psychiatry against the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) action plan to ...

I reviewed Samei Huda’s book The medical model in mental health: An explanation and evaluation  (2019) when it first came out (see review )....

The Nottingham Inquiry has heard 57 days of evidence with the aim of obtaining a clear understanding of the events, acts and omissions that...

The Critical Psychiatry Network (CPN) was formed in 1999 (see eg. my editorial ). The Royal College of Psychiatrists has rejected its applic...

People often understand that something has gone wrong in their brain when they receive a psychiatric diagnosis. For example, people have bee...

As I've said many times (see eg. last post ), psychiatry must stop misleading people about the nature of mental illness. It wants to hol...

The Mental Health and Overmedicalization Summit organised by the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Institute was livestreamed (see youtube v...

As I've said before (see eg. previous post ), psychiatrists have made too many people dependent on psychiatric medication. Relying on th...

Mail on Sunday article highlights the cost and profitability of private ADHD clinics. As I said in a previous post , neurodiversity has bec...

The Independent review into mental health conditions, ADHD and autism (see previous post ) has produced an interim report . Its main inter...

Is there anything wrong with how we understand mental health and illness? Surely we know what these terms mean. After all, our brain can be ...

Sami Timimi (see eg. previous post ) blogs at Mad in the UK about neurodiversity (see post ). As he says, “[T]he belief there is a neurologi...

Lade Smith, outgoing President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, has called on the UK government to address the “silent mental health p...

As I said in my last post , a paper that has been influencing the Future DSM Strategic Committee has been Hyman ( 2021 ). The abstract concl...

Scientific American  reports that the American Psychiatric Association (APA) is optimistic that “DSM [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual] can...

I’ve just watched Joanna Moncrieff being interviewed on It’s your life with James “JC” Cooley” (see video ), one of several video podcasts t...

As I wrote in my book chapter  (see extract ), "From the beginning, the aim of the Philadelphia Association (PA) was to "change t...

As Diana and Nikolas Rose wrote in their 2023  Psychological Medicine article  (see previous post ), psychiatrists tend to see themselves as...

The Mental Health Act 2025 amending the Mental Health Act 1983 received Royal Assent on 18 December 2025 (see DHSC press release ). Alex Ruc...

I’ve criticised Ed Bullmore, Regius Professor of Psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King's Coll...