The term and concept of “stress” has become ingrained in our vernacular. There are scores of articles on how to manage stress in everything from our homes to our health to our workplace and for everyone from moms to dads to the kids. (I’ve written many myself.)

However, according to Dana Becker, Ph.D, author of the thought-provoking book One Nation Under Stress: The Trouble with Stress As An Idea, by focusing on how each person can manage stress, we’re obscuring the bigger picture and issues: the social, political and economic problems that spark and perpetuate our stress in the first place.

Today’s articles and rhetoric on stress imply that if we fix ourselves, we’ll fix everything. Instead of stress-reducing tips empowering us, according to Becker, “we’re being sold a bill of goods.” We’re buying into an illusion that “blames the victim.”

As lawmakers across the country continue to pass ill-conceived laws implicating people with mental illness as having a greater penchant for violence (despite the scientific evidence that says otherwise), a new study has come out showing what most mental health advocates have long known. People with mental illness are far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators of it.

The study — published in the BMJ and conducted on data derived from the entire population of Sweden (can we say, “Big study!”) — found “After adjustment for sociodemographic confounders, any mental disorder was associated with a 4.9-fold risk of homicidal death, relative to people without mental disorders.”

In plain English — people with mental illness in Sweden were at nearly 5 times the risk of being murdered than citizens without a mental illness diagnosis.

Rather than wasting time passing laws to try and minimize outlier, tragic events (which, by their very definition, cannot be minimized by the passage of new laws), we instead should be putting more resources into protecting and helping treat people with mental illness.

Treating people with mental illness takes time, effort, money and resources. People with chronic serious mental illness — such as schizophrenia — sometimes find themselves homeless and reliant upon the state’s public health system for care.

And sometimes that public health care is a little… how shall we say? Lacking.

So last week it shouldn’t have been much of a surprise when Nevada was accused of patient dumping. A psychiatric hospital in Las Vegas, Rawson-Neal, apparently discharged a patient to a bus station to catch a bus to Sacramento, California with a one-way ticket. The patient was under the care of the Southern Nevada Adult Mental Health Services.

The only problem? The patient had no contacts or family in Sacramento, California. He knew absolutely no one there.

Americans take considerable pride in our Constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties, yet our government and institutions often abridge or ignore those rights when it comes to certain classes of people.

According to a National Council on Disability report, people with psychiatric illnesses are routinely deprived of their civil rights in a way that no other people with disabilities are (2). This is particularly so in the case of people who are involuntarily committed to psychiatric wards.

Under present standards of most states, a person who is judged by a psychiatrist to be in imminent danger to self or others may be involuntarily committed to a locked psychiatric ward and detained there for a period of time (3). Some would argue that involuntary civil commitment is a necessary approach justified by safety and treatment concerns. Others would counter that it is an inhumane and unjustifiable curtailment of civil liberties.

Let’s look at the example of recent suicide survivors in order to examine this debate in more depth.

The open source movement has long been about sharing information and code freely and openly. So it’s a little odd when a “grassroots, open security conference” decides to censor a speaker it had invited to talk at one of its conferences.

The security conference, BSides SF, made the decision after a complaint was lodged against the talk by the Ada Initiative’s Valeria Aurora. The Ada Initiative is a group that works “to increase the participation of women in open technology and culture by educating both women and people of all genders who want to support women in open tech/culture” and was co-founded by Mary Gardiner and Valerie.

Valeria Aurora’s complaint was lodged against Violet Blue’s talk entitled, “sex +/- drugs: known vulns and exploits.” But rather than talking directly to the presenter to learn more about what the talk was going to be about, they brought their complaint to BSides SF’s organizer, Ian Fung.

In seeking to censor Violet Blue’s talk and add to the stigma of having open and frank discussions of sexuality, all that happened is that it amplified the controversy — and left a lot of unanswered questions.

You may have missed the Oscars on Sunday night, but you surely haven’t missed all the talk about them since their aired.

One of the things you may have also missed, though, was Oscar-winner Jennifer Lawrence speaking about mental illness and the stigma and prejudice that still surround people with a mental health concern.

In the movie she won the Best Actress Oscar for, Lawrence plays a character who befriends Bradley Cooper’s character, who has bipolar disorder. Her performance is simply wondrous, and given her age at the time of the filming — just 21 — also quite extraordinary.

“I think that there’s such a huge stigma over it [mental illness], that I hope we can get rid of, or help… I mean, people have diabetes or asthma and they have to take medication for it. But as soon as you have to take medication for your mind, there’s this instant stigma. Hopefully we’ve given those people hope, and made people realize that it’s not–”

Click through to watch the interview…

Finally, the U.S. is going to get serious about giving a boost to our understanding of the body’s most important organ — our brain. Stuck in the equivalent of the 19th century medical knowledge, we know less about how the brain works than any other part of the physical body. What we’ve had for the past century are a whole lot of theories and some pretty pictures showing the brain’s uptake of sugar (fMRI) — the modern equivalent of phrenology via brain scans.

Understanding how the black box we call the brain works could unlock the mystery for a myriad of issues — diseases, mental disorders, consciousness, thought processes, emotions and so much more.

The challenge of this effort — to be named the Brain Activity Map project — will be whether it will be properly funded by the federal government. Because while the reward is potentially immeasurable, the risk is also very great.

Did you know that simply watching TV causes harm to children? Well, that’s what the American Academy of Pediatrics would have you believe. And yet, here we are in the sixth decade since TV became popular, and we have not yet seen the end of the world based upon multiple generations that grew up with television as a mainstay.

The latest issue of Pediatrics has two studies — and a bonus editorial! — that suggests television viewing by children is associated with greater criminality and antisocial personality, and that a child’s behavior can be modified by simply changing what they’re watching.

Pediatrics is the mouthpiece for the American Academy of Pediatrics. And while it’s ostensibly an objective, scientific journal, it continually publishes weak research — especially on the effects of TV and children.

Let’s check out the latest…

Everyday, when we open our electronic mailbox, we get our fair share of unsolicited email. Of course, the unsolicited offers have gotten a lot more subtle and duplicitous. A few years ago, dozens of marketeers tried to get us to post badly sourced and designed infographics.

Now they’ve moved on to something that, in my opinion, looks a lot like deception.

In today’s email box, we found an email from “Jeffrey Redd, Project Outreach Director” with an email address of jeff@va.gov.samhsa.net sharing with us “a guide about finding treatment, free of cost.” Wow, really? A new fantastic resource from the folks over at SAMHSA?

But wait, hold on a minute. That email address doesn’t look quite right…

Although this will not come as news to anyone who’s been on any one of the most common psychiatric medications prescribed — such as Celexa, Lexapro, Cymbalta, Prozac, Xanax, Paxil, Effexor, etc. — getting off of a psychiatric medication can be hard. Really hard.

Much harder than most physicians and many psychiatrists are willing to admit.

That’s because most physicians — including psychiatrists — have not had first-hand experience in withdrawing from a psychiatric drug. All they know is what the research says, and what they hear from their other patients.

While the research literature is full of studies looking at the withdrawal effects of tobacco, caffeine, stimulants, and illicit drugs, there are comparatively fewer studies that examine the withdrawal effects of psychiatric drugs. Here’s what we know…

As though a new law would prevent violence, state legislatures across the country are “doing something” about gun violence. The only problem is their focus has been on mental illness, when most murders have little connection with mental illness, and most deaths by guns are not committed by someone with a mental illness.

But it sure makes a legislature feel good about themselves, doesn’t it? “Hey, look, we’re doing something. We’re going to keep guns out of the hands of those crazies.”

Such laws won’t even make a dent in the annual murder rate in the U.S. And at the same time legislators are “doing something,” they are reinforcing the discrimination against those with a mental illness label. Because most of the laws are focused on the labels of mental illness — not actual violent or criminal behavior.

The Judge Rotenberg Center (JRC) is a controversial treatment facility right here in my home state of Massachusetts that uses a form of electroshock therapy in order to “treat” developmentally disabled teens and adults in its care. It’s one-of-a-kind in the nation for its aggressive use of shock therapy — ala B.F. skinner and rats from the 1960s.

Last month, the Center received a warning letter about the continued unauthorized use of “adulterated” shock devices, called GEDs (for Graduated Electronic Decelerators). The Center is the only treatment facility in the country that uses these self-manufactured devices.

They were approved for their intended use by the FDA in 1995. However, since at least 2008, the Center has been using revised versions of these devices — GED3A and GED4 — that deliver higher electrical charges. The FDA has told the Center — repeatedly — that these new versions need to undergo additional testing to demonstrate their safety (especially a concern, given the higher voltage levels the devices reportedly deliver).

And yet, for over four years, the Center has simply ignored the FDA and continues to use the devices — against the FDA’s rules and directives.

Meanwhile, patients in the Center’s care continue — every day — to be shocked against their will. Here is one patient’s story.