Saving Normal News Today

In just two decades, pointing out the pseudoscience of the DSM has gone from being an “extremist slur of radical anti-psychiatrists” to a mainstream proposition from the former chairs of both the DSM-3 and DSM-4 taskforces and the director of NIMH. In addition to the pathologizing of normal behaviors, another explanation for the epidemic — the adverse effects of psychiatric medications — is also evolving from radical to mainstream, thanks primarily to the efforts of Robert Whitaker and h...

The paradox of techno-optimism by embattled tech CEOs and prominent figures of psychiatry at a huge conference on the future of mental health.

No longer confined to “problem children”, ADHD diagnoses are booming – yet it’s a condition that remains widely misunderstood.

In his new book, Hengartner reminds us that depression experts used to consider it a condition that most spontaneously recovered from.

As rates of diagnosis rise, a fierce debate rages in psychiatry. Are you experiencing a parallel pandemic, or having a rational response to a traumatic world?

For much of human history, people with mental illness were thought to be possessed by gods or devils. Madness, as it was called, was believed to be supernatural, not natural. Some Greeks, including Plato, viewed mental illness as a kind of spiritual gift, a portal into new ways of seeing.

Access Denied: Victims of Prescribed Harm Are Abandoned by Psychiatry 43 The United States spends more money on healthcare than any other developed nation in the world. Yet, we have experienced an observable and exponential rise in poor mental health outcomes, disability rates, and suicide over the past several decades. Robert Whitaker’s Anatomy of An Epidemic provides the world with alarming statistics that cannot be ignored. The rise in the number of disabled mentally ill has been especial...

Welcome to Planet Psychiatry 2887 Editor’s Note: This piece is an edited excerpt from the author’s 2020 book, Butchered by Healthcare. Most physicians view psychiatrists as somewhat feral animals. We suspect—with some justification—that many of their ideas are hot air. Unlike any other specialty, psychiatrists take care of people with normal labs and radiologic tests. They keep only patients with purely subjective problems. Psychiatrists pass patients with “organic” issues such as t...