Summary: I respond to some of the points in the recent Rolling Stone article and correct the many inaccuracies and distortions. Ignoring is no longer working, so champions of big Pharma and mainstream psychiatry have gone into attack mode. The strategy is to undermine the messenger (me) in order to neutralise the message. In this…
Summary TL;DR For decades people have been told that depression is caused by a serotonin deficiency. This was the rationale behind the introduction of the SSRI (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor) antidepressants in the 1990s, which were thought to work by boosting low levels of serotonin. Our research shows no evidence of low serotonin in depression,…
Original article: Vincenzo’s commentary: Part 1 Part 2 For those who have not read my original article, it traces the social functions of the mental health system and its relationship to Capitalism. It suggests the principal functions of this system consist of the public provision of care for those who cannot care for themselves, and…
Peter Hacker is an eminent philosopher and one of the world’s leading authorities on Wittgenstein. He has published a four volume analytical commentary on the Philosophical Investigations and a brilliant little book on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mind, now sadly out of print (1). He is also well known for his debunking of neuroscientific reductionism in…
So if mental disorders are not bodily diseases, as I argued in the last blog, what are they and how should we understand them? I realised trying to write this and the next two (and last) blogs how much more difficult it is to set out a positive notion of what mental disorder consists…
I am often asked about alternative ways of helping people with severe mental disorder, especially psychosis. This guest blog by Antoine B.-Duchesne and Sarah Pham describes one such facility in Quebec. It is founded on psychoanalytic principles, but provides a holistic form of care that aims to promote community integration and help people find meaning:
In this blog I want to come back to the work of Thomas Szasz. The last two blogs argue that bodily states and processes need to be understood in a different way from the way we understand what human beings think and do. Mental ‘illness’ consists of things that people say and do. For Szasz,…
Two pieces of research have been published over the last two years that should prompt a major reorientation of the treatment of schizophrenia and psychosis, and a fundamental reappraisal of the use of antipsychotic drugs in general. Put together, these studies suggest that the standard approach to treating serious mental health problems may cause more…
Joanna Moncrieff 