Remove Information Remove Poverty and mental health Remove Trauma and the brain
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Smoke ‘Em if You Got ‘Em: Rethinking Smoking as a Trauma Response

Mad in America

What if smoking isn’t just about addiction or comfort, but about something deeper—something rooted in how trauma reshapes the brain? Research into Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) has uncovered startling connections between trauma and long-term health behaviors. Trauma seems to have a way of impacting brain function.

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Human

Mad in America

Perhaps if I took a different prescription or combination of prescriptions, my brain would magically adjust and rid me of my alleged ‘chemical imbalance’. I was forced to self-medicate by experimenting with various combinations and quantities of drugs and alcohol to ease what I thought was the decline of my ‘mental health’.

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One Person’s Journey from Celebrity Medical Model Advocate to Skeptic: An Interview with Rose Cartwright

Mad in America

Pure portrayed Rose’s autobiographical account of finding that she had OCD, a “mental illness”, and the breakthrough that this medical framework provided her. In this interview, Cartwright charts her journey of painful and lonely disillusionment with the “mental illness” framework. Listen to the audio of the interview here.

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Depression: Psychiatry’s Discredited Theories and Drugs Versus a Sane Model and Approach

Mad in America

P sychiatry’s serotonin-imbalance theory of depression, long discarded by researchers, was finally flushed down the toilet by psychiatry and the mainstream media in 2022. And psychiatrists’ primary treatments for depression—their so-called “antidepressants”—are now circling the drain. 2) What approach to depression makes sense?

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Systemic Insanity

Mad in America

To understand mental illness, we first need to understand what a person really is. Science has a pretty good grasp of how the body and brain work, right? Psychologists help people who feel bad and doctors prescribe medicine for broken brains with a lack of one or another neurotransmitter. W hat is a human being?

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A Bicultural Māori/European Vision for a Truly Healing Hospital

Mad in America

M any people are traumatised rather than healed by their interaction with mainstream mental health services, especially their admission to a psychiatric inpatient unit. Concurrently, many mental health professionals carry a burden of their own trauma and are not healthy individuals. What do we mean by healing?

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Lessons from a Global Psychiatric Conference: The Good, the Bad, and the Complicated

Mad in America

The theme of the conference was public mental health. Elites of the global mental health movement such as Vikram Patel were also present and so were eminent Indian psychiatrists, especially from public sector teaching hospitals. This is known as the Movement for Global Mental Health.