Policy and Advocacy Articles

Listed by most recent articles first.

• ERP Therapy: A Good Choice for Treating OCD
  During OCD Awareness Week in October, I sat in front of my computer, mesmerized, as I watched a live ...
• The Media and Mental Illness: The Good, the Bad and the Ridiculous
  When portraying mental illness and psychotherapy, the media tends to get it wrong -- ...
• The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time
  David Sloan Wilson’s The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time, sports a misleading title. While it does contain teachings that hint at ways we might improve our municipalities, ...
• October is Domestic Violence Month
  Domestic violence remains a huge and largely hidden problem. The purple ribbons you may have seen recently on car bumpers and people’s ...
• Mental Health Professionals: US Statistics
  According to the United States Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are over 552,000 mental health professionals practicing in the ...
• Talking to Families about Mental Illness: What Clinicians Need to Know
  When an individual is diagnosed with a mental disorder, that person's family begins what is often a lifetime of decisions about treatment and care affecting everyone. "Finding the balance between the sometimes conflicting needs of ...
• Home-School Collaboration for Children with Learning Disabilities
  The transition into elementary school can be especially tough for our children with learning disabilities and challenging behavior. Whether ...
• Responding To Mental Illness in Your Workforce: Following the Law
  In Part 1 of this series, Leading a Culture Change, we talked about specific steps ...
• Higher Death Rates for the Mentally Ill
  Researchers have found higher-than-expected death rates from physical health problems for people with mental illness. Dr. Alex Mitchell of ...
• Responding To Mental Illness in Your Workforce: Leading a Culture Change
  As a leader in your organization, you’ve undoubtedly had to handle situations when you’ve been ...
• Black and Depressed: Two African-American Women Break the Silence
  According to Raymond DePaulo, Jr. M.D., Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, African American ...
• Changing Media Depictions of Mental Illness
  The perceptions of mental illnesses have come a long way from their characterization as untreatable maladies, thus forcing the suffering ...
• The Psychopath Test: A Journey through the Madness Industry
  The Psychopath Test: A Journey through the Madness Industry by UK-based journalist Jon Ronson (famous for the book-turned-movie The Men Who Stare at Goats) starts out with a mystery. Someone has sent a bunch of ...
• Myths About Suicide
  In May 2007 a young woman in Oklahoma died of a gunshot wound to the head. Whether it was self-inflicted or not was not apparent. Her family hoped to prove that it wasn’t self-inflicted and ...
• Lack of Safety Net for LGBT Couples Causes Stress
  The "straight safety net" involves both hetero-normative assumptions and heterosexual privilege (defined below). These create often-unacknowledged ...
• Psychiatric Tales: Eleven Graphic Stories About Mental Illness
  Before beginning a review of Psychiatric Tales: Eleven Graphic Stories About Mental Illness, this reviewer feels that it is necessary to disclose that it is the very first graphic novel she has ever read.  Keeping ...
• The Preference for “Natural”
  It will probably come as no surprise that many Americans prefer "natural" to "artificial" when it comes to ...
• Suicide and the Military
  When someone commits suicide, it’s a tragedy. When we are losing more soldiers to suicide than to ...
• Eliminate Outdated Attitudes on Mental Health
  Spring is a time for new beginnings. This year, let’s celebrate the season with a new approach to America’s mental health -- one that will save Americans much shame and suffering even as ...
• Tipper Gore on Mental Illness
  Speech given at Grand Rounds, Department of Psychiatry Dartmouth Hitchcook Medical Center Thursday, January 14, 1999 Good afternoon and thank you, Dr. Silberfarb for the kind introduction It's great ...
• Doctors of Deception: What They Don’t Want You To Know about Shock Treatment
  Linda Andre’s Doctors of Deception: What They Don’t Want You To Know about Shock Treatment is a book that is impossible to ignore. The book was written by a shock treatment victim who lost ...
• After Her Brain Broke: Helping My Daughter Recover Her Sanity
  As mental illness becomes less stigmatized, many individuals are coming out and sharing their experiences with a variety of disorders. The majority of books published on the topic are personal accounts of their struggles. Susan ...
• Depression Is Contagious
  Essentially a self-help book for ordinary people who may be looking for ways to overcome depression, Michael D. Yapko, Ph.D.'s Depression Is Contagious also offers those in the mental health world practical tools for their ...
• Bipolar Disorder and the Americans with Disabilities Act
  The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was amended in 2008 to include bipolar disorder as a covered condition. The original 1988 law was designed to protect people with disabilities from discrimination in hiring, job assignments, ...
• Classroom Adaptations for ADHD Students
  Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a behavioral problem that starts during childhood and affects three to five percent of school-aged children. Children with ADHD may qualify for special education services under two laws: the Individuals ...