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Mood Tracking: My System for Reducing Psychiatric Hospitalizations

Mad in America

D uring my first psychiatric hospitalization in 1998, I was strapped down, placed in 4-point restraints, and administered a painful catheter—apparently because I had peed on the floor during the course of my psychotic episode. Captivity By my count (with an assist from my mother) I’ve had 12 psychiatric hospitalizations in my life.

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Pigs in the Hospital: The Collapse of Venezuela’s Mental Health System

Mad in America

I n preparation for a course on clinical community psychology at my home university in Caracas, Venezuela, I stumbled upon a tweet from an anonymous student complaining about a family of pigs that had occupied the psychiatric hospitalization ward where he was supposed to develop his clinical training. His explanation left me distraught.

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Medication-free Ward in Tromsø, Norway May Soon Close

Mad in America

T his past spring, the Hurdalsjøen Recovery Center in Norway, a private hospital that offered medication-free care to Norwegian psychiatric patients, had to close due to a governmental decision to stop public funding for private enterprises. Now, the medication free-ward in Åsgård Hospital in Tromsø is threatened with closure.

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On the Brink of Murder Because of an Antidepressant

Mad in America

Katinka ended up in a private psychiatric hospital in central London, Florence Nightingale. Then, her private insurance ran out, and she was admitted to a public hospital where they stopped all the drugs cold turkey. She became convinced she had stabbed and killed her two children, Lily and Oscar, 12 and 11 years old, respectively.

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Prescription Drugs Are the Leading Cause of Death

Mad in America

3,4 This estimate was derived from a 1998 meta-analysis of 39 US studies where monitors recorded all adverse drug reactions that occurred while the patients were in hospital, or which were the reason for hospital admission. If we apply this estimate to USA, we get 315,000 annual drug deaths in hospitals. times as many.

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Remembrances of Linda Andre, Leader in the Fight Against ECT

Mad in America

In Doctors of Deception , she wrote about the unquantifiable, permanent harm she experienced at age 24 from 15 coerced shock treatments at New York Hospital: “My life was stolen. Her hospitalizations started in 2010, less than a year after her book was published and before her planned NY Times interview. Forgetting.

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Doctors Are Not Trained to Think Critically

Mad in America

By the time we got to our clinical studies and spent most of our time rotating around the various specialities in the local hospitals, we were well used to being subjected to belittling treatment at the hands of our superiors. The prospect of spending time in the large institution, Springfield Psychiatric Hospital in Tooting, was scary.