“I sit on a man’s back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means — except by getting off his back.” Leo Tolstoy, Writings on Civil Disobedience and Nonviolence (1886)...

On August 16, 2003, six individuals who had travelled from all over the country – Brooklyn; Wilmington, Delaware; Chicago; Portland – to Pasadena, California, began a Fast for Freedom, “a hunger strike to challenge international domination by biopsychiatry.” They were...

So who is James Holmes and why did he do what he did? Is he a lone wolf psycho or a lone psychopath who calculatingly planned a surprise attack on unsuspecting moviegoers; who wired his apartment with high explosives yet alerted police to their presence; who...

“The word is out!” That was Dr. Keris Myrick’s reaction when she was elected earlier this month as the new president of NAMI’s Board of Directors (personal communication). “Wow!” The reaction of many of us when we heard the news. For those of us who know Dr. Myrick,...

New York State’s out-patient commitment program, termed Assisted Out-Patient Treatment (AOT), was instituted in 1999 to protect the general public from treatment non-compliant and presumably violent mental patients. Despite the relatively small number of treatment...

In answer to the question posed in the title to this article, probably not for a long, long time. Or perhaps more accurately, when the entire country does. We often seem to forget that the public mental health system reflects the larger social system of which it forms...

Shortly after I posted a two-part blog on this site back in February about New York’s just-approved Medicaid Health Homes, I got this crazy, ultimately grandiose idea to talk to the case managers and clients I had worked with for years as director of a New York City...

Just had to share this with you. Was copied on an e-mail from Allen Frances yesterday, wherein he informed colleagues that two blogs had been posted yesterday whose principal themes were boycotting the new DSM. One was mine, posted on this site yesterday. The other...

Captain Boycott was the British land agent for Lord Erne of County Mayo who, in 1880, was ostracized from the local community as part of the Irish Land League’s campaign for agrarian tenants’ rights. Rather than harvest Lord Erne’s crops, his tenants let them rot in...

Sixteen million dollars are sitting in Albany, waiting to be converted into fifteen hundred apartments for adult home residents presumed to have serious mental illnesses. The task for CIAD – the Coalition of the Aged and Institutionalized Disabled – and its allies is...

If you log onto the website of the New York State Office of Mental Health at www.omh.ny.gov, you’ll find out that less than three thousand individuals are hospitalized at any one time in the State’s ancient state mental hospitals, euphemistically known for the past...

Just a few final words on this issue. One of the readers of the blog I posted on March 27 on madinamerica.com identified himself as an experienced social worker working as a program director. In response to the question posed in the post’s title “1984 & DSM5...

Where are the social workers? Where are the NASW and its local and state-wide chapters? For that matter, where are the peer-run and -led advocacy and service organizations? Over 12,000 individuals, mental health professionals and other stakeholders, have publicly...

Judging from the responses of several readers, certainly not all, to my previous post of March 7, “Poverty & Mental Illness: You Can’t Have One Without the Other,” poverty is not an issue customarily twinned with serious mental illness. Which is not surprising...

If you’ve spent any time in the public mental health system, you know that folks diagnosed or labeled as having serious mental illnesses are poor. If you’ve been poor or worked with poor folks, you know that many poor folks suffer from affective and cognitive...

Given the length of this blog and the subject matter it addresses, I’ve divided it into two parts. Part II appears immediately below, Part I in a separate posting. Thanks for your patience and interest. PART II – ISSUES TO BE ADDRESSED, STRATEGIES TO ADDRESS THEM...

Given the length of this blog, I’ve divided it into two parts. Part I appears immediately below; Part II will be posted soon. PART I – WHAT MENTAL HEALTH HOMES ARE AND WHAT THEY’RE NOT On the ground reality is about to trump rhetoric. Whether you subscribe to my...

Just a few days ago, the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, perhaps the foremost legal advocacy organization for persons with disabilities in the country, issued its “vision of community integration” for the disabled, listing the “key principles” that should be...

You can’t have one without the other. I’ll explain as we go along. As 2011 was winding down, SAMHSA issued what it termed its “… working definition of ‘recovery’ from mental disorders and substance abuse disorders …” Specifically, recovery is to be understood as “a...