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Mad in Puerto Rico

Mad in America

W hen Laura Lopez-Aybar was thirteen, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder (BPD). Throughout her teenage years, everything Lopez-Aybar did was treated as a sign of her mental illness. Rather, he realized, mental distress was “embedded within our larger social, cultural life.”

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Heritability Explains Less About Mental Disorders Than You Think

Mad in America

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. Much has already been written about these points, for example in my book on mental health and substance use (open access). Bipolar disorder 413,000 64 4.6

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Brain Disorders or Problems with Living? How Research on “Mental Illness” Went Awry

Mad in America

Books such as The Myth of Mental Illness by Thomas Szasz and The Death of Psychiatry by E. Fuller Torrey argued that the very concept of mental illness was meaningless. Other somatic interventions for mental illness, such as lobotomy and insulin coma, were as discredited as bloodletting. A bad metaphor. An excuse.

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One Person’s Journey from Celebrity Medical Model Advocate to Skeptic: An Interview with Rose Cartwright

Mad in America

Pure portrayed Rose’s autobiographical account of finding that she had OCD, a “mental illness”, and the breakthrough that this medical framework provided her. In this interview, Cartwright charts her journey of painful and lonely disillusionment with the “mental illness” framework. This was short-lived. My OCD had relapsed.

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

Mad in America

Torrey is a psychiatrist and a researcher on schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. In research circles, he’s known as the founder and executive director of the controversial Stanley Medical Research Institute, which has spent more than $550 million on biological research on schizophrenia and bipolar disorder over the past few decades.