When the Devil Knocks is the intimate story of a woman suffering from Dissociative Identity Disorder, formerly known as Multiple Personality.
Doris Lessing: thoughts on psychosis
Doris Lessing, Nobel prize winner (thoughts on psychosis) is excerpted below. How is it a novelist understands more about extreme states of mind than most psychologists?
Ethan Watters: Crazy Like Us
I've done several posts on this book because the idea it's covering is very important. We are exporting our very poor understanding of the psyche to other cultures. There are several other posts on this blog that comments or shares info on this book, look here.
What does psychological health look like? Not what you might think
A less visible view of psychological health also exists: Successful adaptation to and embracing of the dominant values, behavior and attitudes of the society or milieu you're a part of. The problem here is that such socially-conditioned norms have also embodied greed, self-absorption, domination, destructiveness and divisiveness. They've been equated with "success" in adult life.
It’s not just psychiatry: Why Almost Everything You Hear About Medicine Is Wrong
what if wrong answers aren’t the exception but the rule? More and more scholars who scrutinize health research are now making that claim. It isn’t just an individual study here and there that’s flawed, they charge. Instead, the very framework of medical investigation may be off-kilter, leading time and again to findings that are at best unproved and at worst dangerously wrong.
F.D.A. Is Studying the Risk of Electroshock Devices
Background: Electroshock devices have been on the market since 1937, but have never undergone the approval process for safety and efficacy required by the FDA for devices of this type. These devices were “grandfathered” into the system when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration assumed jurisdiction in this area in 1976.
An invitation to do nothing…
This site invites you to do nothing for two minutes. Click here to do just that. Gentle, sneaky way to introduce mindfulness. It can start with something just this simple! h/t to Nancy from Virtual Connections
Let go (there’s beauty in the breakdown)
(click the player after clicking the link) Drink up baby down Mmm are you in or out Leave your things behind 'Cause it's all going off without you Excuse me Too busy Writing your tragedy These mishaps You bubble wrap When you've no idea what you're like... So let go (let go) Jump in Oh... Continue Reading →
Acknowledging The Survivor: Exclusion, Trivialisation and Denial
In looking at exclusion I would like to use the systemic lens. That which is excluded creates imbalance and so, I believe, as a society we become imbalanced at a collective level when we refuse to acknowledge difficult and painful truths within our society. Nowhere is this felt more keenly than by the psychiatric survivor. As a so-called ‘civilised’ society we collude in our collective trivialisation of both the violation of human rights of this marginalised minority group and the trauma, pain and silencing of this group. This I believe is our last great civil rights movement.
Confessions of a non-compliant patient
by Judi Chamberlin `` I tried hard to be a good patient. I saw what happened to bad patients: they were the ones in the seclusion rooms, the ones who got sent to the worst wards, the ones who had been in the hospital for years, or who had come back again and again. I was determined not to be like them. So I gritted my teeth and told the staff what they wanted to hear. I told them I appreciated their help. I told them I was glad to be in the safe environment of the hospital. I said that I knew I was sick, and that I wanted to get better. In short, I lied.