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Self Stolen: How ECT Fried My Brain

Mad in America

A traumatic brain injury in 2002 didn’t help anything. I tried going back to school after the brain injury, but between the bipolar disorder and the head trauma, I couldn’t handle the stress and pressure anymore. I was in ICU for 11 days, and on a ventilator for four of those days. My IQ tested at 144.

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Depression: Psychiatry’s Discredited Theories and Drugs Versus a Sane Model and Approach

Mad in America

P sychiatry’s serotonin-imbalance theory of depression, long discarded by researchers, was finally flushed down the toilet by psychiatry and the mainstream media in 2022. And psychiatrists’ primary treatments for depression—their so-called “antidepressants”—are now circling the drain. 2) What approach to depression makes sense? Genes and depression?

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Teralyn Sell and Jenn Schmitz: Breaking Out of the Prison of Prescribing and Finding the Freedom of Therapy

Mad in America

Dr. Teralyn Sell is a distinguished expert in Psychology and Brain Health, holding a PhD in Psychology and an MS in Counseling Psychology. Teralyn Sell is a distinguished expert in Psychology and Brain Health, holding a PhD in Psychology and an MS in Counseling Psychology. The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity.

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Criticisms That Establishment Psychiatry Can and Cannot Tolerate

Mad in America

Thus, establishment psychiatry is unthreatened by the idea that trauma and adverse childhood experiences are a cause of emotional suffering and behavioral disturbancesas long as these conditions are medicalized. F or the institutions comprising establishment psychiatry, self-preservation means maintaining legitimacy as a branch of medicine.

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Searching for the “Psychiatric Yeti”: Schizophrenia Is Not Genetic

Mad in America

This paper is surprising since Torrey has long argued that schizophrenia is a brain disease to be treated biomedically. T he decades-long attempt to locate the gene or genes for schizophrenia has failed, according to a new article in Psychiatric Research by prominent schizophrenia researcher E. Fuller Torrey.

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Psychiatry struggles to cope with its inherent uncertainty

Critical Psychiatry

Terry Lynch , who wrote a chapter for my Critical Psychiatry edited book, has posted a video asking why doctors pay so little attention to trauma in the lives of people with psychiatric diagnosis. The belief that primary mental illness is brain disease clothes psychiatry with an aura of factuality, even though that belief is incorrect.

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Peaceful Reflections on the Past from ‘One Who Got Away’

Mad in America

My family life growing up was a good period for me, and I have no complaints, yet there seemed to be something in the way my nervous system was wired, a leftover of birth trauma perhaps, that meant that relaxation and physical comfort weren’t part of my being. Perhaps broken open a bit, but in a good way.