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Depression: Biological or Psychological?

Mad in America

J ust about everyone believes that depressionthe #1 psychiatric diagnosisis explained in the same way as physical illnesses; that is, that depression, too, is of genetic/physiological origin. NIMH and psychiatrists have not always explained depression to be genetic (as “running in the family). Their efforts have failed.

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The New WHO and UN Guidance: Psychiatry Must Entirely Change

Mad in America

A fter years of work involving hundreds of people in dozens of countries, the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) have released their joint production, Mental Health, Human Rights and Legislation: Guidance and Practice ( WHO/OHCHR , 2023, referred to as the Guidance.

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

Mad in America

In summary, researchers have found no serotonin nor any other neurotransmitter association with depression, no neurobiological associations, and no genetic associations. They justify this with the 2006 reported results of the NIMH-funded “ Sequenced Treatment Alternatives to Relieve Depression (STAR*D). But What If It’s Broken?”

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Undisclosed Financial Conflicts of Interest in the DSM-5: An Interview with Lisa Cosgrove and Brian Piper

Mad in America

Mad in America has previously examined the problems with conflicts of interest in research but this time we extend that to look at the potential effect of COIs on diagnostic tools such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). I’d like to think that maybe our 2006 study had a small role to play in that.

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Chemically Imbalanced: Joanna Moncrieff on the Making and Unmaking of the Serotonin Myth

Mad in America

Dr. Moncrieff is a psychiatrist who works in the National Health Service in the United Kingdom. Moncrieff: When I was in medical school we were taught, as we’re still officially taught now, the biopsychosocial model of mental disorders. Whitaker: So now you go out and you’re in the asylum or mental hospital.

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Why Failed Psychiatry Lives On: Its Industrial Complex, Politics, & Technology Worship

Mad in America

Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) from 2002-2015, acknowledged in 2011, “Whatever we’ve been doing for five de­cades, it ain’t working. adults now takes an antidepressant”; however, Time continued, “Mental health is getting worse by multiple metrics. As of late 2022, just 31% of U.S.

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The Clinical, Social, and Cultural Harm of an Iatrogenic Psychiatry

Mad in America

Iatrogenesis is social when medicine as an institution and a bureaucracy creates ill-health by increasing stress; by subverting autonomy and community support; and by depoliticizing sources of illness. This alienation is of course quite stressful and a source of ill-health. The natural course of depression without any medication?