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During my teenage years I met the World Health Organization’s criteria for “schizoid personality disorder”. At the time, I did not consider the possibility that there might be anything wrong with me. Instead, I believed that my isolation was a result of a lack of social understanding. So at age eighteen, when I left my harmful family environment to go to college, I set out to remedy this lack of social skills. I broke off communication with every one of my high school associates and set out to meet lots of new people and involve myself in many social activities. Meanwhile, I learned everything I could about human behavior. I researched history, economics and art; biology, anthropology and evolution. I learned the principles of marketing and tried them out in real life. I visited websites and combed one-by-one through what amounts to perhaps a thousand individual psychological research summaries. Then I examined the mathematics of information theory and machine learning to put this all together. ...

On December 10, Vice President Joe Biden announced that $100 million of new Federal money is to be injected into the US mental health system “…to expand community-based services and treatment centers.” There’s a short article about this in the Washington Post. It’s written by Scott Wilson, the Post’s chief White House correspondent. The article states that the “…inadequacy of mental health and addiction care…” is a topic that “…gained urgency after the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, a year ago, a crime carried out by a mentally disturbed gunman.” This is a reference to 20-year-old Adam Lanza, who killed 20 children and 6 adult staff, himself, and his mother in the incident. ...

Jeffrey Lieberman, MD, President of the APA and Chair of Psychiatry at Columbia University, published a post on November 26 on Psychiatric News. The article is called Training the Psychiatrists of the Future, and is co-authored by Richard Summers, MD. Dr. Summers is a Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. Drs. Lieberman and Summers open by telling us that psychiatrists’ roles “…are changing and will continue to change.” That sounds great, but don’t expect too much. There will still, they tell us, be a need for: ...

I found the above image online yesterday, at the site The Things We Say. Mental illness is also man-made. It is the invention of psychiatry - their spurious medicalization of all significant problems of thinking, feeling, and/or behaving. Its purpose is to legitimize the prescription of dangerous psychotropic drugs to as many people as possible. It benefits psychiatrists and drug companies, but damages, stigmatizes, and disempowers its victims. ...

In 2004, 26-year-old Dan Markingson committed suicide. Since then, numerous concerns have been expressed about the events that led up to his death. In particular, it has been claimed that he was coerced into the CAFE study, and that he was too delusional to understand what was involved. It has also been reported widely that his mother, Mary Weiss, saw his condition deteriorate while he was taking the study drug - Seroquel (quetiapine) - and that she made numerous unsuccessful requests to the researchers to have him removed from the study. ...

A Norwegian psychiatrist has written a book for children with the title «Pappa’n min er syk i tankene sine», which translates into «My daddy is ill in his thoughts». I applaud her wish to help children understand what is going on when a parent is having mental problems. I also disagree with the belief system she writes within, the idea that depression and anxiety and psychosis are illnesses of the thoughts or brain. ...

Joanna Moncrieff is an eminent British psychiatrist, a founding member of the Critical Psychiatry Network, and the author of several papers and books, including The Myth of the Chemical Cure and Bitterest Pills. I have discussed both of these books on this website, and I recommend them highly. Dr. Moncrieff speaks out clearly and fearlessly about the concepts and practices that drive modern psychiatry. In both of the books mentioned above, Dr. Moncrieff advocates a shift from a disease-centered model of drug action to a drug-centered model. ...

In December 2012, Mark Olfson, MD, et al, published an article in the Archives of General Psychiatry. The title is National Trends in the Office-Based Treatment of Children, Adolescents, and Adults with Antipsychotics. The authors collected data from the National Ambulatory Medical Care Surveys for the period 1993-2009, and looked for trends in antipsychotic prescribing for children, adolescents, and adults in outpatient visits. Here are the results: Age Increase in no. of antipsychotic prescriptions per 100 population (1993-2009) 0-13 0.24-1.83 (almost 8-fold) 14-20 0.78-3.76 (almost 5-fold) 21+ 3.25-6.18 (almost 2-fold)   The authors provide a breakdown of the diagnoses assigned to the children and adolescents during the antipsychotic visits. ...

On November 28, I put up a post on the adverse effects of benzodiazepines, including the potential for protracted and serious withdrawal problems. Since then I’ve become aware of a helpful and interesting resource in this area. It’s called Benzo Info, and is on Monica Cassani’s blog, BeyondMeds. Monica has first-hand experience of benzodiazepine withdrawal, and her comments and suggestions are always helpful, supportive, and insightful. She also provides a comprehensive list of links to other materials dealing with specific aspects of this problem, including forums and support groups. ...

On November 25, Mad in America posted a link to an article in the Journal of Neurological Sciences. The article is by Harnod et al, and is titled An Association between Benzodiazepine Use and Occurrence of Benign Brain Tumors. The authors studied the records of 62,186 individuals in Taiwan who had been prescribed a benzodiazepine for at least 2 months between 2000 and 2009. They compared the incidence of brain tumors in these patients with the incidence in patients in a matched-pairs control group. The hazard ratio for benign brain tumors (benzo group vs non-benzo group) was 3.15 (95% confidence interval: 2.37-4.20). The hazard ratio for malignant brain tumors was 1.21 (95% confidence interval: 0.52-2.81). What this means essentially is that one can be 95% confident that the benign tumor association is real, but that the malignant tumor result might have arisen by chance. ...