Category: schizophrenia

Mad Spiritual musings on diversity and inclusivity

a tree of life for Mad Spiritual musings on diversity and inclusivity

Update 2026: This project never came to be. Tragically my friend Ian Scheffel died before we could manifest our vision. Still as a piece of history on this path I've found myself in, I am keeping this all of this in the archives. The below video was a favorite of mine. I took it down for a few years along with all my other videos. This one I did put back up. I still have dreams for sucha world in which community would include all of us. We want to create community and support for all of us who've experienced madness as having significant spiritual significance. Whether we've been psychiatrized or not and whether we've considered madness in terms of the psychiatric labeling or not. That would include anyone labeled with psychosis, schizophrenia, bipolar, schizoaffective, or psychotic NOS. That would also include anyone who has had experience with altered states that have not been pathologized by psychiatry, by self or others.

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Beyond withdrawal…

I see in retrospect that some core, vital part of me was always there during the drugged years, learning and remembering much that would help me in these years of coming off meds and now being med free. I no longer believe that I “lost” my life to drugs. This is, as Mary Oliver, puts it, my "one wild and precious life."

Understanding and Working With Psychosis (Part II of II)

a viscious storm

by Joel Schwartz, PsyD -- First and foremost, if psychosis is indeed a process of growth and reorganization following an initial breakdown, then the primary task of the therapist is not to cure or prevent the psychosis in the person, but accompany them through their transition into something else.

An inclusive approach to mental health: Not all in the brain

submitted to Beyond Meds by Oxford University Press - By Michelle Maiese -- For many years, the prevailing view among both cognitive scientists and philosophers has been that the brain is sufficient for cognition, and that once we discover its secrets, we will be able to unravel the mysteries of the mind. Recently however, a growing number of thinkers have begun to challenge this prevailing view that mentality is a purely neural phenomenon. They emphasize, instead, that we are conscious in and through our living bodies. Mentality is not something that happens passively within our brains, but something that we do through dynamic bodily engagement with our surroundings. This shift in perspective has incredibly important implications for the way we treat mental health –

Returning to Dialogue – The Core of Healing Madness

When people are “mad,” they are often insisting that certain things are so, and frequently seem unwilling or incapable of appreciating or learning from other perspectives. Yet when the supposedly “sane” mental health system approaches those who are mad, it typically does the same thing ...

After Klonopin: Renée’s Healing

cover from Psychiatrized the book After Klonopin

update 2024: Renée now has a book out. Psychiatrized: Waking up after a decade of bad medicine.After Klonopin: Renée's Healing: It’s been thirty months since I took my last bit of Klonopin, a dangerously addictive medication that a doctor prescribed for me when I was suffered from insomnia. Thirty months since my world flipped upside down. As you’ll recall, back in August 2013, I began to experience extreme withdrawal symptoms after a 1-year controlled taper, despite the fact that my wean was (mostly) supervised by a medical professional. At that time, I suffered from thousands of side effects, too numerous to list here. Unable feed myself, I couldn’t watch television, speak on the telephone, get on the computer, read a book or listen to the radio. I lived in solitary confinement, too sick to leave the house. I suffered irrational fears and believed people were trying to kill me. And I endured a depression so crushing that I considered killing myself multiple times.

Top 10 posts from Beyond Meds 2015 (and the top ten from all time too)

I continue to be pleased to know this blog is being used as the resource I’d hoped it would become.

Recovering or adjusting to illness?

By Lewis Mehl-Madrona M.D. (psychiatrist) -- Many of us were not surprised when the research failed to support the currently dominant biomedical model of psychiatry. A 2015 panel at the American Psychiatric Association's annual meeting in Toronto confirmed that even more research is accumulating to question the benefits, if any, of the long-term use of anti-psychotic medication. Paris raises the question, why doesn't research change anything? ... [click on title to read the rest]

Change, change, change

Sometimes I hear people say that nothing is changing. That psychiatry continues to harm and that for this reason despair rather than hope is warranted. -- I don't see it this way at all anymore. ...

Mental wellness: empowering ways to consider our difficult experiences

Part of coming to understand our profound capacities to heal and transform is to first know that it's possible. I know 1000s of folks who've been able to discover this now. I have met them in mental health circles and chronic illness circles both. I've also met them among people who've never suffered in these ways but were lucky enough to be born into situations where they simply learned how to do it right from the beginning. Imagine that. We can create a world where we teach children how to profoundly take care of themselves and others. ...

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