antipsychiatry

Step 1: The Easy Introduction

You may want to join a well known new religious movement. By new religious movement I mean cult. Then you will be told what to think and how to argue very badly. You will also probably become very poor very rapidly.

There you go, you have nothing to lose but your mind itself the one step plan to becoming an antipsychiatrist.

Read the rest of this entry »

Apologies to those of you who are fans of gratuitous nudity and girl-on-girl action involving Mia Kirshner (and who doesn’t like that, eh?), but the L word we’re referring to here is “labelling”.

Labels, particularly psychiatric labels, tend to come with a large amount of baggage. They’re regarded as pejorative, they often stay on your medical record permanently and they can be source of discrimination and stigma.

I’m going to discuss this in the context of a young lad with Aspergers Syndrome. We’ll call him Edmund.
Read the rest of this entry »

Following the reports that antidepressants aren’t helpful, comes an article on the Guardian’s Comment is Free website by Adam James entitled ‘Myth of the Antipsychotic’.

Antipsychotic drugs don’t work, are causing a brain damage epidemic and almost triple the risk of dying early, a new book claims. Yet the mental health establishment, as it did with Prozac, is failing to take the evidence seriously.

The book James is referring to is Joanna Moncrief’s The Myth of The Chemical Cure. I haven’t read Moncrief’s book, so this post isn’t a critique of her arguments. However, I do have a criticism to make in response to Adam James’ article.
Read the rest of this entry »

A referral letter comes to CAMHS from the GP. A child is experiencing distress as a result of being bullied at school, and the GP wants us to see the child. At the team meeting, the consultant wonders whether this is really a psychiatric issue or more of a school issue. The letter is handed to the Primary Mental Health Worker (whose role it is to liaise with GPs, schools, voluntary agencies and other people who have contact with children but aren’t mental health specialists themselves), and she’s asked to find out a bit more about it. She writes back to the GP asking which school the child is at, if the school are aware of the problem, and if so what steps they’re taking to try to halt the bullying. She also asks for some more detail as to what psychiatric symptoms the child is displaying, if any.

The GP writes back to the PMHW. His reply doesn’t answer any of the PMHW’s questions. Instead he simply reiterates that the child is “acutely distressed” by the bullying and therefore he wants the kid to have a psychiatric appointment.
Read the rest of this entry »

From the Nursing Times:

RMNs branded as ‘idle’ by others

Researchers have claimed that mental health nurses are often viewed as idle and incompetent, possibly because of stigma around their clients. According to a survey of 122 US nurses published in the ‘Archives of Psychiatric Nursing’, mental health was an area in which nurses least wanted to work and one that received the least respect from the public. Of nine characteristics listed in the survey, psychiatric nurses were most likely to be described as ‘unskilled’, ‘illogical’, ‘idle’ and ‘disrespected’. Researchers said the negative perceptions could indicate the presence of stigmatizing attitudes toward people with mental health issues. The findings are similar to those of studies conducted with medical students in Australia and in the United States, in which psychiatry was ranked similarly as less attractive and least respected.

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the “pleasures” (if you can call it that) of child and adolescent mental health is that we get to see the next generation of mental health users growing up. Its a truism of child psychiatry that attachment disorders grow up to become borderline personality disorders, conduct disorders grow up to become antisocial personality disorders, and so on.

Let’s talk about conduct disorders, since at the moment I’m working with a lad who could be described (when I have my clinician hat on) as “displaying a conduct disorder with anger problems and oppositional behaviours”. Were I to have encountered him in the street, away from such niceties as “non-judgemental attitudes” and “unconditional positive regard”, I’d probably describe him as “a nasty, chavvy little fucking thug” and then yell at him to stay the fuck away from my car.
Read the rest of this entry »

The various practices of psychiatry are based on different theories of mind. Psychiatry has been accused by some of being little more than a pseudo science and by others as an instrument of social control. It is true that what previously had been considered a mental illness is not necessarily considered to be such now (homosexuality, sexual promiscuity) and current trends in diagnosing behaviour such as conduct disorder as a mental illness are not without controversy either. The anti psychiatry movement associated with Thomas Szasz held that there was no such thing as mental illness because illness referred to bodily disease and the mind is not part of the body. (Sasz, Thomas 1974) but this extreme view has few adherents today.
Read the rest of this entry »