Remove 2020 Remove Bipolar disorder Remove Trauma and the brain
article thumbnail

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.

article thumbnail

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. Torrey is a psychiatrist and a researcher on schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Fuller Torrey. Nor have any new treatments become available from this research.”

Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

Heritability Explains Less About Mental Disorders Than You Think

Mad in America

It is now common knowledge that there is no reliable biological test, or biomarker, for any of the hundreds of disorders in the DSM-5. However, mental disorders are not concrete things that can be found with a brain scanner or treated with medication like a bacterial infection with antibiotics.

article thumbnail

Giving Caregivers a Platform: Meagan, Mother of Matt

Mad in America

By late November, 2018, Matt found a psychiatrist who diagnosed him with Bipolar 1 disorder after one visit, prescribed Latuda, tapered him off Prozac, and practically sentenced him to be medicated for life with an overall “fair” prognosis. The ER physician had given him Prozac. I could see his lifeless eyes.

article thumbnail

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

Mad in America

H ow can psychiatry maintain its authority and influence despite its repeated scientific failures and lack of progress—now even acknowledged by key members of the psychiatric establishment and the mainstream media? In 2023, Time reported , “About one in eight U.S. As of late 2022, just 31% of U.S.

article thumbnail

Healing From Psychiatric Drug Harm, Part 2: Rational Approaches to Recovery

Mad in America

In my last piece , I wrote about various neuro-rehab therapies I engaged in with Dr. J, the functional brain injury specialist, and that there came a point when my husband and I knew we’d reached the end of what medical science could offer me. I sat down to write this article with the experience of severe akathisia fresh in my mind.

article thumbnail

Do Critics of Biological Psychiatry Have an Alternative to a Life of “Whack-A-Mole”?

Mad in America

Joanna Moncrieff, Chemically Imbalanced (2025) E stablishment psychiatry has recently switched the biological cause of mental illness from a chemical imbalance to a brain circuitry defect. Challenging the biological model of depression feels like a game of whack-a-mole: as soon as you put one theory to bed, another one sprouts up.