madinamerica

In February, the American Society of Clinical Psychopharmacology (ASCP) issued a series of recommendations on psychotropic drug deprescribing.1 Derived from a Delphi survey completed by a 45-member international task force, the recommendations purport to offer guidance to clinicians on when and how psychiatric drugs should be deprescribed. Consensus was deemed to have been ac...

“I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself—so like a brother, really—I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again.”
—Albert Camus, L’Etranger (The Stranger)

A pervasive feature of psychiatry ideology is an impoverished perspective, one which pat...

On my chest, over my right pectoral, I have a tattoo. It isn’t a ribbon for recovery. It isn’t a semicolon, though I’ve got a few of those in other places. It’s the pagan symbol of Mephistopheles — the mark Faust signed with when he made his deal.

I have other tattoos from the schizoaffective years — the dates when I was discharged from the hospital, a night sky coveri...

Having worked in mental health for well over a decade, there is a pattern that becomes increasingly difficult to ignore. A wide range of social and interpersonal difficulties are now being understood through the lens of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In many cases this is appropriate and reflects a broadening of clinical awareness. However, it also reflects a shift in how di...

“The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

And with leather straps they cinched
me to the gurney, hefted me
into the mouth of the ambulance,
and I lay there in my paper gown
watching the slow traffic—
those glinting schools of homebound
fish—while at m...