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New Guidelines on How to Accurately Convey ADHD Information

Mad in America

A vivid example is that healthcare professionals tend do classify the youngest in a classroom as having ADHD up to twice as often as their older classmates—due to their normal age-appropriate behavior: a stunning but long-known research finding that has insufficiently found its way to a broader audience.

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When the Help Becomes Part of the Problem

Mad in America

M y first encounter with the psychiatric system in America was at the age of 18. With each step I took into the building, the kilos of shame I had felt since the age of five built up upon my back. He was amicable, handsome, and seemed to be around the age of twenty-five. 5 on the 4.0 I was a failure. I’ll call him Carlos.

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Students Don’t Need Spying, They Need Trust

Mad in America

Y ouths are facing a mental health crisis. America has a track record of stigmatizing mental health struggles, particularly the mental health struggles of students with historically marginalized identities. But in today’s overly paternalistic culture, schools take away opportunities for self-growth.

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Psychiatry, Capitalism, and the Industrial Machine

Mad in America

Children grew up in these settings, learning independence and self-reliance from a young age. Economic systems are portrayed as immutable laws of nature, obscuring the fact that they are human constructs. At the same time, mental health professionals are as powerless as anyone else to change the dysfunctional systems.

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“It Is What It Is” — Learning From the Past Without Getting Stuck in It

Mad in America

In that moment, in that mental-ward room alone, I felt I was the helpless target and it was my enemy bent on my destruction. A castaway in the hospital with pneumonia five times from age three months to five years, my only “rescue” was as an infant (presumed to be at d eath’s d oor).

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Sexual Sanism: Why Anti-Queer Rhetoric Is a Threat to the Mad, Too

Mad in America

S exual sanism permeates the ways our culture talks about and treats the mentally ill, queer people, and, more broadly, anyone who relates or reacts inappropriately to the world and people around them. Sexual sanism is a label Ive used to describe the ways in which sexuality and sanism are co-constructed in our society.

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We Are Amidst the Age of Behavioral Alchemy

Mad in America

I’m going to introduce to you a new definition of mental health and, in doing so, am going to show that this group is more mentally healthy, for which we should be very concerned. THE STATE OF PSYCHOLOGY AND MENTAL HEALTHCARE TODAY I routinely rummage through all the biographies of professors at leading universities.