Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “Mental disorder”
A new study published in PLoS scientifically validates what so many drum circle participants have already experienced first hand: group drumming produces significant changes in well-being, including improvements in depression, anxiety and social resilience. With the World Health Organization identifying depression as the #1 leading cause of disability, globally, and psychiatric medications causing severe side effects, including permanently disabling the body’s …
Psychiatry is notorious for saying “oops!” for a long history of abusing patients with pseudoscience-driven treatments and its shameful lack of diagnostic rigor. From the1949 Nobel Prize for therapeutic lobotomy to theRosenhan experiments in the 70s which exposed the invalidity of a psychiatrist’s clinical judgment (hospitalizing and treating actors feigning psychosis), the field is in crisis. The New Biology of Mental Illness My …
Sometimes, it just takes one case to bring an entire medical construct to its knees. Because if the current model can’t encompass it, then the model must evolve to accommodate the seeming outlier. Currently, psychiatry is in a freefall. With its priesthood abandoning its own tenets around biomedical explanations for mental illness, there is room now, for a new model to …
The subject of narcissism has intrigued people for centuries, but social scientists now claim that it has become a modern “epidemic”. So what is it, what has led to its increase, and is there anything we can do about it? In the beginning The term narcissism originated more than 2,000 years ago, when Ovid wrote the legend of Narcissus. He tells the …
A silent tragedy in the history of modern health care is happening right now in America, but no one is talking about it. We have been told a story of depression: that it is caused by a chemical imbalance and cured by a chemical fix—a prescription. More than 30 million of us take antidepressants, including one in seven women (one …
Depressed, anxious, and substance-abusing people can beat themselves up for being defective. And psychiatrists and psychologists routinely validate and intensify their sense of defectiveness by telling them that they have, for example, a chemical-imbalance defect, a genetic defect, or a cognitive-behavioral defect. In plain words, many depressed, anxious, and substance-abusing persons think: “I feel fucked up because I am essentially …
The word “affluenza” is much in vogue. Lately, it’s been linked to a Texas teenager, Ethan Couch, who in 2013 killed four people in a car accident while driving drunk. During the trial, a defense witness argued that Couch should not be held responsible for his destructive acts. His parents had showered him with so much money and praise that he …
Adderall, the most popular drug for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), has been used by many of the 6.4 million American children currently diagnosed with ADHD but also misused by 20-30% of all students who are trying to gain better concentration for taking tests in college. It can be extremely addictive, and has a row of side effects including nervousness, dry mouth, poor circulation, numbness in …
The term “schizophrenia,” with its connotation of hopeless chronic brain disease, should be dropped and replaced with something like “psychosis spectrum syndrome,” argues a professor of psychiatry in The BMJ today. Professor Jim van Os at Maastricht University Medical Centre says several others have called for updated psychiatric classifications, particularly regarding the term “schizophrenia.” Japan and South Korea have already abandoned this …
In the Land of the Free, one-quarter of the entire planet’s prison population, some 2.2 million people, currently languish behind bars; yet, an astonishing number of them — around 2 million — have never been to trial. Indeed, these figures categorically debunk the notion the criminal justice system in the United States maintains any semblance of its formation’s original intent: …
