Thinking differently about mental health

Like Carmine Pariante, I have treated thousands of patients since I started as a trainee psychiatrist in 1985 and became a consultant over...

As mentioned in my previous post , I have been reading The sedated society: The causes and harms of our psychiatric drug epidemic   edited...

Sami Timimi, in his chapter "Starting young: Children cultured into becoming psycho-pharmaceutical consumers - The example of childho...

I mentioned the article about One hundred years of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins in my previous post . The article focuses on how Adolf Mey...

Roger Cooter has an article on why the neuro-turn in popular and academic culture needs to be taken seriously. I tend to regard it as ...

Further to my previous post , I have been looking at the 2010 study by Jo Moncrieff & Jonathan Leo on the effects of antipsychotic dr...

As Robin Murray mentioned in his article discussed in a previous post , a 1976 paper by Eve Johnstone, Tim Crow et al showing cerebral ventr...

I'm not sure if Nassir Ghaemi 's letter to a medical student about choosing psychiatry as a speciality (see Medscape article ) is...

In a comment on my previous post about his article, Robin Murray has highlighted what he calls critical psychiatry's "scepticis...

In a BJPsych article , Will Davies  &  Rebecca Roache  (2017) identify a philosophical research programme for reconceptualising Georg...

Professor Sir Robin Murray confesses to mistakes in an end of research career mea culpa (see article ). He questions whether schizophrenia...

The Philosophy Special Interest Group of the Royal College of Psychiatrists has asked for submissions for its conference next year on Phil...

RSM videos have recently uploaded a lecture by Tom Burns (see previous post ) given earlier in the year on anti-psychiatry (see video ). H...

I used Kam Bhui's photo to accompany my previous post . Kam is editor of the British Journal of Psychiatry ( BJPsych ). In the past, h...

I have been thinking about the definition of mental illness by Dinesh Bhugra, Antonio Ventriglio and Kam Bhui which I quoted in my  previo...

As I have said before (eg. see previous post ), I don't have a problem with the term 'mental illness'. In a recent comment in...

Tsou (2016) makes a case for natural kinds of mental disorders. This seems to be dependent on his claim that there is "good evidence...

Mary-Ellen Lynall in a BMJ blog  says she'll be "deeply concerned" if new and better mental health treatments don't gro...

I have always taken the view that modern psychiatry has been split between two conceptual understandings of mental illness. At the Trienn...

I have been reading Richard Noll's book American Madness , which is well worth a read. He includes information about Bayard Taylor Hol...

Allen Frances in a blog on Huffpost suggested that psychosis is at least partially caused by neurological (brain) malfunction. Of course ...

Frank Blankenship comments on Mad in America about my previous post on "Psychiatry as a cultural system". He suggests there...

NIMH has a new director, Dr Joshua Gordon . An article in The New York Times  criticises the previous director, Thomas Insel, for shiftin...

Richard Bentall (mentioned in eg. previous post ) and Simon Wessely (again, mentioned in eg. previous post ) go head-to-head in a confer...

I have been looking at a presentation I gave on whether critical psychiatry is the same as "anti-psychiatry" (see powerpoint sli...

Gary Sidley expresses his frustration in a blog recently reposted on Mad in America that it " seems unrealistic – even naïve – to ex...

I've said before that neuroscience needs to be more critical (see previous post ). If it wants to include psychology, it is essential t...

An article in The  New York Times  says that alternatives such as the Hearing Voices Network (HVN) and Open Dialogue are starting to take ...

An article in The Lancet Psychiatry accuses those who refuse to accept the evidence for schizophrenia being an organic condition as bein...

A seminar  on schizophrenia in The Lancet says the syndrome "seems to originate from disruption of brain development caused by geneti...

Peter Breggin has a blog on Mad in America entitled " Forced 'treatment' is torture ". His blog follows that by Peter Gø...

Next May's meeting of the Association for Advancement of Philosophy and Psychiatry in San Diego is on "Philosophical Perspectives...

Robert Whitaker (who I have mentioned previously eg. see previous post ) has posted on the Mad in America blog about the  All party pa...

The latest paper from the National Confidential Inquiry into Suicide and Homicide (NCISH) published in The Lancet Psychiatry  starts from...