Psychiatry and Suicide Prevention: A 30-year Failed Experiment

There’s an interesting article on Mad in America dated September 17, 2013. It’s titled Psychiatry & Suicide Prevention: A 30-year Failed Experiment, and was written by Maria Bradshaw. Maria Bradshaw is the founder of CASPER, an organization that rejects the medical model of suicide prevention in favor of a sociological model. Ms. Bradshaw founded CASPER after her son’s antidepressant-induced suicide. Here’s the gist of Ms. Bradshaw article: Roger Mulder, MD, is head of psychiatry at Otago University in New Zealand. For at least the last 15 years, he has supported the notion of psychiatric intervention as a suicide-prevention measure. For instance, here’s something he wrote in 2008 in an article published in Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica: ...

September 27, 2013 · PhilHickeyPhD

SSRI's Impair Learning.

There’s an interesting article on Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience. It’s called Learning from Negative Feedback in Patients with Major Depressive Disorder is Attenuated by SSRI Antidepressants. The researchers evaluated learning ability in three groups: medication-naïve individuals who met the criteria for Major Depressive Disorder individuals who met the criteria for MDD and were receiving the SSRI paroxetine (Paxil) "healthy" controls All subjects were given a learning task that allowed the researchers to distinguish learning from positive feedback versus learning from negative feedback The results were: ...

September 24, 2013 · PhilHickeyPhD

"Mental Illness" Under Fire

There’s a very interesting article by Paris Williams on Mad in America, The “Mental Illness” Paradigm: An “Illness” That is out of Control. You can see it here. The author gives us a compelling critique of the “mental illness” model, and also presents us with an alternative paradigm. The alternative is: "… to see those conditions we generally refer to as 'mental illnesses' as instead the natural manifestations of an individual’s struggles with the fundamental dilemmas inherent in simply being alive." ...

May 3, 2013 · PhilHickeyPhD

Do We Need More Mental Health Services?

In the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, there were a great many calls for “more mental health services” or “better access to mental health services.” Many of us on this side of the fence groaned, because we knew that any official or private response to this call would be on the lines of more of the same. The same spurious concepts; the same pseudo-illnesses; the same destructive drugging; the same destructive electric shock “treatment”; the same involuntary confinement; and the same stigmatization and loss of empowerment. ...

May 2, 2013 · PhilHickeyPhD