Articles on Policy and Advocacy
Book Review: American Snake Pit
As a society, we often forget those who are in the most dire need. We tend to wave off any thoughts of the developmentally disabled or those left behind...
Book Review: Saving Talk Therapy
“Nowadays, people don’t ‘go into therapy’…they ‘receive mental health interventions,’” writes Enrico Gnaulati in a cynical introduction to his new book Saving Talk Therapy: How Health Insurers, Big Pharma, and...
Book Review: Insane Consequences
I have read Insane Consequences: How the Mental Health Industry Fails the Mentally Ill a couple of times and am still contemplating it. It also inspired me to research...
Marriage and Mania: Disparate Depictions of Bipolar Disorder in Mainstream Romance Novels
When characters with mental illness appear in popular fiction, it is typically because the work itself focuses on the mental illness. However, there is a small contingent of fictional...
Book Review: The Diagnostic System
While it’s true that many illnesses are foreign to the average person, many of the core symptoms of mental illness are familiar to virtually everyone. “Not only does the...
Book Review: Welcome to Your World
Students of psychological research have become familiar with a wide array of factors that play a role in how our lives unfold, including our personalities, upbringing, talents, motivation, social...
I’ve Been Seeing a Therapist for Years, So Why Am I Not Getting Better?
The answer: We need to address what’s happening inside the office as well as stigma. During the creation of the documentary Going Sane I interviewed Cindy Bulik. She is...
Narcissistic Abuse Affects Over 158 Million People in the U.S.
World Narcissistic Abuse Awareness Day is June 1, and everyone, unless you’re living under a rock, has heard the word narcissist. In fact, the word is tossed around so...
Book Review: Bad Feminist: Essays
The title of Roxane Gay’s New York Times bestseller is Bad Feminist. But you don’t have to be any kind of feminist, or even have any interest in feminism,...
Book Review: The New Better Off: Reinventing the American Dream
Courtney E. Martin opens The New Better Off: Reinventing the American Dream with the fact that “For the first time in history, nearly two-thirds of Americans do not believe...
Book Review: The Power Paradox
Want to understand power? Forget Machiavelli! For too long, argues Dacher Keltner, author of The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence, we have accepted unquestioningly the version...
Book Review: When Your Child Is Gay
In late October 1996, Wesley Davidson discovered a note in her son’s bedroom. “It was a love note, my son’s name entwined with another boy’s surrounded by a heart.”...
Book Review: Ordinarily Well: The Case for Antidepressants
For those in the field of mental health, the debate about the efficacy of pharmaceutical medications has been an enduring and uncertain one, and this debate can sometimes end...
Book Review: Redeemable: A Memoir of Darkness & Hope
It has been said that to know true redemption, one must first know true devastation or destruction. After taking a step into the world of Erwin James through the...
Book Review: Negotiating the Nonnegotiable
Life is about conflict and negotiation. We have a sense of who we are and what holds meaning for us. What is meaningful is not the same for everyone,...
