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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. This blog is not about the cruelty of psychiatric institutions, although they can be cruel.

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Everything About Us Without Us

Mad in America

T his historical record of Oregons first state hospital, the Oregon State Insane Asylum, from its opening in 1883 until the mid-1950s, will focus on the experiences of patients there. The guiding principle for the hospital during these seven decades, whether recognized or not, was Everything About Us Was Without Us.

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How I Developed a Critical Perspective on Psychiatry

Mad in America

A person may come into hospital on no drugs at all, only to leave with several psychiatric drugs, often causing adverse side effects which leads to more prescriptions to counteract the side effects. It’s tragic that these people may then be wrongly labelled as personality disordered, bipolar, or psychotic.

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The Trauma Craze: How the Expansion of Trauma Diagnoses Fueled Victimhood Culture

Mad in America

While expanding trauma criteria is often justified as necessary for inclusivity and compassion, critics contend that these expansions may be driven, by some, out of self-interest. TIC has become so popular that its approach is boasted by most hospitals, schools , social services, correctional facilities.

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How to Explain Top Psychiatrists’ “Dr. Strangelove Exuberance” Unchecked by Reality

Mad in America

Insel is a prime example of a top psychiatrist with exuberance about psychiatry regardless of his awareness of the reality of its repeated failures. “I Authored by psychiatrist Marshall Garrick, this article provides a window to the cultural values of psychiatry, and how self-serving rationalizations are considered artful diplomacy.

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My Story of Surviving Psychiatry

Mad in America

I am typing this blog in the back of a taxi wending its way to the airport through the hilly landscape of Sardinia, my beautiful daughter sleeping in the seat beside me. Unlike after my first admission I internalised my new self-image as a bipolar psychiatric patient and it ended up literally disabling me.

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SAFE: Survivors And Families Empowered—An Update

Mad in America

Time to put up, I began writing… They rode in silence to Fair Oaks Hospital, parents aching for the recovery of a broken child. You must trust us to treat him in the way we know best; otherwise he could be in a mental hospital for the rest of his life. Is what my family encountered truly different, better now than 50 years ago?