“Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them.” Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote, 1605-15 Since April, 1999, when fifteen Columbine High School students were shot and killed and...

Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims. — Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 1978   (Editor’s note: This blog is an excerpt from Jack Carney’s book Nation of Killers: Guns, Violence, White...

Greetings. It seems that somebody’s passing is the only thing that will stir me sufficiently to write about what’s going on in this benighted country. I had anticipated writing this a week or two ago but I got sidetracked. It’s certainly not too late, since Hoffman’s...

A great American passed away the other day. Ordinarily, I never indulge in such chauvinism, but how else can you describe Pete Seeger? Who else has contributed as much to the country’s emotional and spiritual well-being? I haven’t posted to this site for more than two...

I.  DSM-5 Boycott: Yes, the boycott of the DSM-5 continues. I can’t tell you how many fewer DSMs have so far been purchased as a result of the boycott; and conversations I have had with professionals in New York’s public mental health system lead me to believe that...

Introduction: The article below was originally accepted for November publication in a small British academic review for psychology students. On the heels of its acceptance, the article was rejected by a senior editor who, for unknown reasons, decided that what I wrote...

(I had planned to post this article on Mad In America on June 26th to acknowledge International Day in Solidarity with Victims of Torture. My computer crashed … better late than never.) “There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said — no....

Greetings, MIA readers. Would you like to write your own review of the DSM-5 (even if you haven’t read it, never mind bought it.) I’ve done neither, but I’ve read, talked, written enough about it to have an opinion. One of our Boycott Committee members, Wendy...

If there is no struggle, there is no progress.                                                                                                    –     Frederick Douglass You never know what you’re going to accomplish when you start something. Which is why you start...

Tomorrow, May 18, the American Psychiatric Association kicks off its 166th annual conference. That same day, its new DSM-5 will be officially published. Given the occurrences of the past couple of weeks, which I’ll review briefly below, some members of the APA might...

“No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.” Edmund Burke, 1757 “Fear exceeds all other disorders in intensity.” Michel de Montaigne, 16th C. “It is a sad fact of life that power and fear are the fountainheads of faith.”...

Does anybody know what’s going on around here? Groucho probably had the best answer: “I don’t know what they have to say, It makes no difference anyway, Whatever it is, I’m against it. No matter what it is or who commenced it, I’m against it. Your proposition may be...

Machiavelli had it right. “There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order to things.” Ever since we launched our DSM-5 Boycott three weeks ago, we’ve...

Boycott the DSM-5! Believe it or not, there’s some confusion about what “boycott” means. Bluntly, it means “Don’t purchase or use the object being boycotted.” Remember the United Farm Workers and table grapes and iceberg lettuce? I remember walking a picket line daily...

Scapegoating is an ancient human practice that probably dates from the time the first human beings decided to circle their huts — what we fondly term the dawn of civilization. When things got tense in the compound, penalties got handed out to one or more individuals...

This is the third time in less than two years that I’m writing an article about young men walking into public venues and shooting a dozen or more people at a time — first Tucson, then Aurora, now Newtown. The Newtown killer, Adam Lanza, didn’t just walk into the Sandy...

When plans for the DSM-5 were first announced about ten years ago, most folks’ reaction was “Why?”. Many of us asked that same question several times as the publication date for the new tome kept on getting pushed back. Finally, the curtain enshrouding the DSM-5 Task...

[This is the second part of a two-part article about the system of surveillance and social control that has been established in this country with psychiatric involuntary commitment laws at its center, and about a possible campaign to end Kendra’s Law or Assisted...

[This is the first part of a two-part article about the system of surveillance and social control that has been established in this country with psychiatric involuntary commitment laws at its center, and about a possible campaign to end Kendra’s Law or Assisted...

In response to my own question, not yet, although a handful of us, including me and a few social work researchers that I’ll reference below, are attempting to push the profession in the U.S. in that direction. As for “post-psychiatry”, that’s a term that two Irish...