Remove 2023 Remove Neurotransmitters and mental health Remove Trauma and the brain
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America’s Unhealthy Relationship with Antidepressants

Mad in America

Antidepressants are Americas first-line treatment for the most common mental health problems, e.g., depression, anxiety, and insomnia. When the Covid-19 pandemic brought its cascade of anxiety, trauma, and grief, many Americans turned to antidepressants for relief.

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Who Do We Leave Behind When We Ignore the Body? Why Critical Neuroscientists and Mad Activists Must Work Together

Mad in America

The prevailing logic goes: if we can validate biometric tests that are clinically predictive of mental health concerns like in other medical fields, we can more precisely, effectively, and without (solely) subjective clinical observation, treat the malady. Should we give up the search for biomarkers altogether?

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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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Day # 161: Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD)

Bullet Psych

It does this by enhancing GABA_A receptors (inhibitory neurotransmitter) and inhibiting NMDA glutamate receptors (excitatory neurotransmitter). Epidemiology & Pathogenesis 4 , 5 Genetics , environmental influences , and mental health comorbidities contribute to vulnerability. Highest rates in ages 1829.

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On Not Becoming David Foster Wallace

Mad in America

I didn’t know Wallace was a poster boy for antidepressant withdrawal because I didn’t know that antidepressant withdrawal was common, or that I would be experiencing it myself and understanding firsthand the hellish bodily and mental feelings that make one long for death, for everything to stop.

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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.