Book Review: What If This Were Enough?
At a time when we are relentlessly urged to do better, be better, improve ourselves, be happy, and display our happiness for all to see, what a relief it would…
Policy and Advocacy
Book Review: Palaces for the People
We face daunting problems in the twenty-first century — polarization that has people at each other’s throats, the isolation that can result from our fraying social bonds, the growing inequality…
There Is No Evidence That Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria Exists
Rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) is the name given to a hypothesized new clinical subgroup of transgender youth, which would be characterized by coming out as transgender out of the blue…
Book Review: How Behavior Spreads
It has become a cliché to say that something has “gone viral,” and hardly a day (or a newscast) goes by that I don’t hear that tired phrase at least…
Book Review: Also Human: The Inner Lives of Doctors
It’s hard to imagine having someone’s life in your hands. It’s also hard to imagine what could possibly prepare a person for the emotional cost of such as endeavor as…
Book Review: Ethics Challenges in Forensic Psychiatry & Psychology
I used to work at a community mental health center. A client could be there totally on his or her own (which was the exception) or could have been referred…
Don’t Tell Me to Shut Up: The “Et Tu, Brute” Stigma of Mental Illness
After sharing my eccentric journey to recovery in a new book, I’ve been accused of being anti-psychiatry. I’m not anti-psychiatry. I’m only anti-psychiatry if it means questioning the long-term efficacy…
Implicit Bias Leads to Explicit Danger
There has been considerable and well-deserved publicity regarding cases where implicit or explicit police bias has led to unwarranted arrests and shooting of unarmed black individuals. The Starbucks case illustrates…
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 due…
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 Slanted…
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 further…
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 projects…
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 public…
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 connections,…
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 perhaps…