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Israel Journal of Psychiatry

Improving community mental health services: The need for a paradigm shift

Abstract

Background: It is now over half a century since community care was introduced in the wake of the closure of the old asylum system. This paper considers whether mental health services, regardless of location, can be genuinely effective and humane without a fundamental paradigm shift.

Data: A summary of research on the validity and effectiveness of current mental health treatment approaches is presented. Limitations: The scope of the topic was too broad to facilitate a systematic review or meta-analyses, although reviews with more narrow foci are cited.

Conclusions: The move to community care failed to facilitate a more psychosocial, recovery-focused approach, instead exporting the medical model and its technologies, often accompanied by coercion, into a far broader domain than the hospital. There are, however, some encouraging signs that the long overdue paradigm shift may be getting closer.

Authors: Longden, Eleanor. Read, John. & Dillon, Jacqui.

Published in: Israel Journal of Psychiatry and Related Sciences, 53(1), pp. 22-30.

Date: 10 Feb 2017

Link: https://doctorsonly.co.il/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/05_Longden_Improving-Community.pdf

Phoenix

Making Sense of Madness: An emancipatory approach

7 July 2017, 10 am – 4.30pm, registration from 9.30am

Hackney House, 25-27 Curtain Road, Hackney, London, EC2A 3LT

https://madness-london.eventbrite.co.uk

This unique, one day event, featuring Jacqui Dillon and Rai Waddingham (recently featured on BBC Horizon: Why Did I Go Mad?), explores experiences often dismissed as symptoms of serious mental illness: voices, visions, paranoia, unusual beliefs and altered states, and reframes them as understandable human responses to adversity.

Drawing from personal and professional experiences of madness, healing and recovery, combined with emerging innovative research findings, Jacqui and Rai present an emancipatory approach to understanding and working with distressing experiences that prioritises respect, personal meaning, self-determination and liberation.

Download: Making Sense of Madness Flyer

It includes:

  • Understanding ‘mad’ experiences
  • Exploring factors that can contribute to and shape distress
  • Alternatives to diagnosis – moving beyond the illness model
  • Respectful ways of helping people in distress
  • Strategies to survive and thrive

This day is suitable for:

  • Anyone interested in understanding more about madness, creativity and the complex spectrum of human experience
  • Those involved in supporting another human beinga – whether this is as a friend, ally, family member, colleague, mental health professional, teacher, therapist, social worker, voluntary sector worker, manager or spiritual advisor
  • All those with lived experience of madness and distress

Fees:

  • Unwaged: £10
  • Voluntary Sector & Self Funding: £90
  • Statutory & Commercial: £125

Please get in touch if you’re in a difficult financial position – we may be able to help.

Register:

https://madness-london.eventbrite.co.uk

Maudsley Debates – Enabling or Labelling?

This House believes that psychiatric diagnosis has advanced the care of people with mental health problems.

Wednesday 5th June, 6pm (refreshments served from 5.30pm)

To coincide with the publication of the 5th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), sometimes described as the “Bible” of American psychiatry, the Institute of Psychiatry is hosting a debate on the issue of psychiatric diagnosis.  Some argue that a rigorously  standardised system of classification of mental disorders forms an essential role in conceptualising a patient’s problem, in predicting what treatments are likely to be effective, and in conducting valid scientific research.  Others consider psychiatric diagnoses to be no more than labels, which lack scientific and predictive validity and serve only to stigmatise and objectify those who suffer from mental disorders.  These issues will be debated in the 48th Maudsley Debate on Wednesday 5 June at 6pm at the Wolfson Lecture Theatre, Institute of Psychiatry, Denmark Hill.  The motion is “This House believes that psychiatric diagnosis has advanced the care of people with mental health problems.”  

Speaking for the motion:

Prof Norman Sartorius, former president of the World Psychiatric Association

Prof Anthony David, Professor of Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, Institute of Psychiatry

Speaking against the motion:

Dr Felicity Callard, Senior Lecturer in Social Science for Medical Humanities, Durham University and Chair of the Board, Mental Disability Advocacy Center

Dr Pat Bracken, Clinical Director of Mental Health in West Cork and author of “Post- Psychiatry: Mental Health in a Post-Modern World”.  

Chair:  Sir Simon Wessely, Professor of Psychological Medicine and Vice Dean for Academic Psychiatry, Institute of Psychiatry

 Wolfson Lecture Theatre, Institute of Psychiatry Main Building, De Crespigny Park, London SE5 8AF

Contact: Hannah Baker

For further information please see: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/iop/news/debates/index.aspx 

The Hearing Voices Network – “The Freedom to Hear Voices”: The Hearing Voices Movement

Psychology, Mental Health and Distress is a groundbreaking new text from John Cromby, David Harper and Paula Reavey. Whereas other texts are structured by diagnostic categories and are biologically reductive, this book places biology as well as the experience of distress itself in its social, cultural and historical context.

 Key Features:

  • Offers a wealth of case stories to portray the reality of living with distress and stimulate class discussion 
  • Fully informed by current experimental, qualitative and theoretical psychological research including research into hearing voices
  • Includes a chapter authored by those with first-hand experience of mental health services, ensuring your students understand the nuances of this emotionally charged and often controversial topic

Features additional contributions by renowned figures including Professor Richard Bentall, Professor John Read, psychiatrist and researcher Joanna Moncreiff and campaigner and Chair of the Hearing Voices Network, Jacqui Dillon among others.

See link for further information: http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?pid=280329

Download flyer: CrombyHarper&Reaveyflyer

 

Hearing Voices Groups: Creating Safe Spaces to Share Taboo Experiences

 

Psychosis as a Personal Crisis seeks to challenge the way people who hear voices are both viewed and treated. This book emphasises the individual variation between people who suffer from psychosis and puts forward the idea that hearing voices is not in itself a sign of mental illness.

In this book the editors bring together an international range of expert contributors, who in their daily work, their research or their personal acquaintance, focus on the personal experience of psychosis.

Further topics of discussion include:

  • accepting and making sense of hearing voices
  • the relation between trauma and paranoia
  • the limitations of contemporary psychiatry
  • the process of recovery.

This book will be essential reading for all mental health professionals, in particular those wanting to learn more about the development of the hearing voices movement and applying these ideas to better understanding those in the voice hearing community.

 

Demedicalising Misery: Psychiatry, Psychology and the Human Condition.

Demedicalising Misery: Psychiatry, Psychology and the Human Condition. Co-edited with Mark Rapley  and Joanna Moncrieff. Published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Thomas Szasz (1960) suggested that the myth of ‘mental illness’ functions to ‘render more palatable the bitter pill of moral conflict in human relations’. The medicalization of distress enables the mental health professions to manage the human suffering that they are confronted with, and also the suspicion that there is little that they can do to help. But the medicalization of misery and madness renders people unable to comprehend their experiences in ordinary, meaningful terms. In this collection we restore to everyday discourse a way of understanding distress that, unlike contemporary psychiatry and psychology, recognises and respects the essential humanness of the human condition. De-medicalizing Misery is a shorthand term for this project. The book resists the psychiatrization and psychologization of human experience, and seeks to place what are essentially moral and political – not medical – matters back at the centre of our understanding of human suffering.

Notes on Contributors
Preface; R.Dallos
Carving Nature at its Joints? DSM and the Medicalization of Everyday Life; M.Rapley, J.Moncrieff & J.Dillon
Dualisms and the Myth of Mental Illness; P.Thomas & P.Bracken
Making the World Go Away, and How Psychology and Psychiatry Benefit; M.Boyle
Cultural Diversity and Racism: An Historical Perspective; S.Fernando
The Social Context of Paranoia; D.J.Harper
From ‘Bad Character’ to BPD: The Medicalization of ‘Personality Disorder’; J.Bourne
Medicalizing Masculinity; S.Timimi
Can Traumatic Events Traumatise People? Trauma, Madness and ‘Psychosis’; L.Johnstone
Children Who Witness Violence at Home; A.Vetere
Discourses of Acceptance and Resistance: Speaking Out About Psychiatry; E.Speed
The Personal Is the Political; J.Dillon
‘I’m Just, You Know, Joe Bloggs’: The Management of Parental Responsibility for First-Episode Psychosis; C.Coulter & M.Rapley
The Myth of the Antidepressant: An Historical Analysis; J.Moncrieff
Antidepressants and the Placebo Response; I.Kirsch
Why Were Doctors so Slow to Recognise Antidepressant Discontinuation Problems?; D.Double
Toxic Psychology; C.Newnes
Psychotherapy: Illusion With No Future?; D.Smail
The Psychologization of Torture; N.Patel
What Is To Be Done?; J.Moncrieff, J.Dillon & M.Rapley
Figure: Papers Using Term ‘Antidepressant’ On Medline 1957-1965
Index

‘Despite longstanding awareness of the limitations of the medical model when applied to difficulties of human behavior and adjustment, the fields of psychiatry and psychology continue to accede to the pressures of medicine and the drug industry in their conceptualization of these human realities. Ironically, however, this medical model, eager as it is to fit so much of people’s experience into diagnostic categories, is a social construction. This book represents a significant effort to de-mystify, de-medicalize, and reclaim important aspects of the human condition.’ – Kenneth D. Keith, Professor, Department of Psychological Sciences, University of San Diego, USA

 

De-Medicalizing Misery has assembled an impressive cast of leading mental health experts. Together they challenge the simplistic and pessimistic biological model of human distress that has, with eager support from the pharmaceutical industry, dominated the mental health field for far too long. This evidence-based, humane and optimistic book not only explains where biological psychiatry went wrong, it spells out the alternatives.’ – John Read, University of Auckland, New Zealand and Editor of ‘Models of Madness’

 

  ‘The psychiatrist or psychologist is expected to do something for every patient sitting in front of him or her, but how robust is the intellectual basis of psychiatric science when psychiatric ‘diseases’ are merely symptom clusters – clustered by us, not by nature? We are in indeed in the age of the medicalization of everyday life, when Lord Layard, economist and architect of the IAPT programme, can write in the BMJ that ‘mental illness’ has taken over from unemployment as our greatest social problem. But what is the test of ‘mental illness’? In DeMedicalizing Misery the authors examine some of the domains lamentably absent from orthodox psychiatry and psychology training programmes, with their medical model focus, and in so doing raise the IQ of the whole debate. And not just for clinicians.’ – Dr Derek Summerfield, Consultant Psychiatrist & Senior Lecturer, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College, London, UK.
 

Authors: MARK RAPLEY is Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of East London, UK. He is the author of The Social Construction of Intellectual Disability, Quality of Life Research and, with Susan Hansen and Alec McHoul, Beyond Help: A Consumers’ Guide to Psychology.
 
JOANNA MONCRIEFF is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mental Health Sciences at University College London, UK and a Practising Consultant Psychiatrist at the North East London Foundation Trust. She has spent her academic career re-evaluating the nature and efficacy of psychiatric drugs and exploring the history and politics of psychiatry. She is the co-chair of the Critical Psychiatry Network, and has campaigned against the dominance of the biomedical approach to psychiatry, the extension of psychiatric coercion and the influence of the pharmaceutical industry, in alliance with service user groups. She is the author of The Myth of the Chemical Cure (Palgrave Macmillan), A Straight Talking Introduction to Psychiatric Drugs, and numerous papers and book chapters.
 
JACQUI DILLON is the National Chair of the Hearing Voices Network, UK, and a Director of Intervoice – the International Network for Training, Education and Research into Hearing Voices. She is a campaigner, international speaker and trainer specialising in hearing voices, psychosis, dissociation and trauma. She is the co-editor of Living with Voices: An Anthology of 50 Voice Hearers’ Stories of Recovery. She has published numerous articles and papers, is on the editorial board of the journal Psychosis: Psychological, Social and Integrative Approaches and is a member of the collective for Asylum, The Magazine for Democratic Psychiatry.


Experts call for ban on schizophrenia ‘label’

Published in: Daily Mail, 9 October, 2006

Schizophrenia should be abolished as a concept because it is unscientific, stigmatising, and does not address the root causes of serious mental illness, a group of experts said today.

The diagnosis, which emerged in the 19th century, is flawed and harmful, they claimed. It not only grouped together patients with widely ranging symptoms, but offered no explanation for their illnesses.

Once given a diagnosis of schizophrenia, a person was labelled an incurable social misfit and placed at the mercy of a psychiatric system that mostly benefited the drug industry.

A new campaign called CASL (Campaign for the Abolition of the Schizophrenic Label) is said to be gaining increasing support from both patients groups and professionals.

It wants patients to be assessed according to their individual experiences and histories rather than blanket-categorised as “schizophrenic”.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-409472/Experts-ban-schizophrenia-label.html#ixzz1H2oOhJEG

Critical & Alternative Perspectives

Critical & Alternative Perspectives

On The Web

The Campaign to Abolish the Schizophrenia Labelwww.caslcampaign.co
CASL is calling for the label of schizophrenia to be abolished on the grounds that it is outdated, unscientific, stigmatising and presents a barrier to effective and appropriate support to individuals diagnosed with the label.

Coming off Psychiatric Medicationwww.comingoff.com
Information about coming off psychiatric medication.

The Critical Psychiatry Networkwww.critpsynet.freeuk.com
The Critical Psychiatry Network provides a network to develop a critique of the contemporary psychiatric system.

The Freedom Centrewww.freedom-center.org
An American-based support and activism community for anyone experiencing mental health difficulties. Includes event lists, links and advice around medication.

The Fireweed Collective – http://theicarusproject.net
Support network started in the U.S. for people ‘navigating the space between brilliance and madness’

The International Critical Psychiatry Networkwww.criticalpsychiatry.net
Created by medical doctors as a forum (primarily for medical doctors) to discuss, critique, and publicise opinions, practices, literature, and events that support critical thinking and alternative approaches to psychiatry.

International Network Toward Alternatives and Recoveryhttp://intar.org/
Gathers prominent survivors, professionals, family members, and advocates from around the world to work together for new clinical and social practices towards emotional distress and what is often labeled as psychosis.

Peter Lehmann Publishingwww.peter-lehmann-publishing.com
Publishes excellent books available in English on alternative approaches to mental health problems.

Mad Pride www.ctono.freeserve.co.uk
The all new website of this energetic mental health surivivors organisation. Includes details of future gigs & events, the origins of Mad Pride and their ‘Stop The Suicides’ campaign

MindFreedom Internationalwww.mindfreedom.org

MindFreedom International unites 100 grassroots groups and thousands of members to win campaigns for human rights of people diagnosed with psychiatric disabilities.

National Service User Networkwww.nsun.org.uk
Aims to create a network which will engage and support the wide diversity of mental health service users and survivors across England in order to strengthen the user voice.

PCCS Bookswww.pccs-books.co.uk
Publisher of counselling and psychotherapy books and journals. Committed to reflexive, radical and critical contemporary psychology theory and practice

Soteria Networkwww.soterianetwork.org.uk
Soteria is a network of people in the UK promoting the development of drug-free and minimum medication therapeutic environments for people experiencing ‘psychosis’ or extreme states.

The Spiritual Crisis Networkwww.spiritualcrisisnetwork.org.uk
A UK based network set up to improve access to approaches that view psychosis as a spiritual crisis or spiritual emergence ideas.

World Network of Users and Survivors of Psychiatryhttp://wnusp.rafus.dk/
WNUSP is an international organization of users and survivors of psychiatry.

In Print

Asylum Magazinewww.asylumonline.net/subscribe.htm
Asylum magazine is a forum for free debate, open to anyone with an interest in psychiatry or mental health. We especially welcome contributions from service users or ex-users (or survivors), carers, and frontline psychiatric or mental health workers (anonymously, if you wish). The magazine is not-for-profit and run by a collective of unpaid volunteers.

Appignanesi, L. (2008) Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present. Virago Press.

Barker, P. Campbell, P. Davidson, B. (1999). From the Ashes of Experience. Whurr Publishers.

Bentall, R. (ed.) (1990). Reconstructing Schizophrenia. Hove: Routledge.

Bentall, R. (2003). Madness Explained: Psychosis and Human Nature. London: Penguin.

Bentall, R. (2009). Doctoring The Mind: Why Psychiatric Treatments Fail. London: Penguin.

Boyle, M. (1990). Schizophrenia: A Scientific Delusion? London, Routledge.

Bracken, P. and Thomas, P. (2005). Postpsychiatry: Mental Health in a Postmodern World. Oxford: Open University Press.

Breggin, P. (1991) Toxic Psychiatry: Why Therapy, Empathy and Love Must Replace the Drugs, Electroshock and Biochemical Theories of the New Psychiatry. Flamingo; (Reissue) edition (2010)

Breggin, P. (2008). Brain Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry. New York: Springer.

Chesler, P. (1972). Women and Madness. New York: Avon.

Cohen, C. and Timimi, S. (2008). Liberatory Psychiatry: Philosophy, Politics and Mental Health. Cambridge University Press.

Coleman, R. (2004). Recovery: An Alien Concept (2nd Edition). Fife: P&P Press Ltd.

Frame, J. (2008). An Angel At My Table. Sydney: Vintage.

Foucault, M. (1965). Madness and Civilization. New York: Vintage.

Greenberg, J. (1964). I Never Promised You A Rose Garden. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Grof, S. (1985). Beyond the Brain: Birth, Death and Transcendence in Psychotherapy. State University of New York Press.

Grof, S. (1988). The Adventure of Self-Discovery: Dimensions of Consciousness and New Perspectives in Psychotherapy and Inner Exploration. State University of New York Press.

Hammersley, P., Langshaw, B., Bullimore, P., Dillon, J., Romme, M. and Escher, S. (2008). Schizophrenia at the tipping point. Mental Health Practice, 12(1), 14 – 19.

Hornstein, G.A. To Redeem One Person Is To Redeem The World: The Life of Frieda Fromm-Reichman. Free Press.

Hornstein, G.A. (2009). Agnes’s Jacket: A Psychologist’s Search for the Meanings of Madness. Rodale Press.

Johnson, B. (2005). Emotional Health. Trust Consent Publishing.

Johnson, B. (2005). Unsafe at Any Dose. Trust Consent Publishing.

Johnstone, L. (2000). Users and Abusers of Psychiatry. Hove: Routledge.

Joseph, J. (2003). The Gene Illusion. Ross-on-Wye: PCCS Books.

Joseph, J. (2006). The Missing Gene: Psychiatry, Heredity, And the Fruitless Search for Genes. New York: Algora.

Laing, R. (1959). The Divided Self. London: Tavistock.

Laing, R. and Esterson, A. (1964). Sanity, Madness and the Family. London: Penguin.

Laing, R. (1967). The Politics of Experience. London: Penguin.

Millett, K. (1990). The Loony-bin Trip. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Moncrieff, J. (2009). The Myth of the Chemical Cure: A Critique of Psychiatric Drug Treatment. Palgrave Macmillan.

Mosher, L. et al. (2004) Soteria: Through Madness to Deliverance. Philadelphia: Xlibris.

Newnes, C. et al. (eds) (1999). This is Madness. Ross-on-Wye: PCCS Books.

Newnes, C. et al. (eds) (2001). This is Madness Too. Ross-on-Wye: PCCS Books.

Nightsky, O. (1999). The Bridge Between Two Worlds. A Shaman’s View of Schizophrenia and Acute Sensitivity. Keepwell (NZ) Ltd.

Rapley, M. Moncrieff, J. Dillon, J. (2011). Demedicalising Misery: Psychiatry, Psychology and the Human Condition. Palgrave Macmillan.

Read, J. and Reynolds, J. (1996). Speaking Our Minds: An Anthology. Palgrave Macmillan.

Read, J. (2009). Psychiatric drugs: Key Issues and Service User Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan.

Read, J. Bentall, R. and Mosher, L. (2004). Models of Madness: Psychological, Social and Biological Approaches to Schizophrenia. Routledge; New edition.

Smith, K. and Sweeney, M. (1997). Beyond Bedlam. Anvil Press Poetry.

Stastny, P. and Lehmann, P. (Eds). (2007). Alternatives Beyond Psychiatry. Shrewsbury (UK): Lehmann Publications.

Szasz, T. (1988). Schizophrenia: The Sacred Symbol of Psychiatry. Syracuse University Press.

Thomas, P. (1997). The Dialectics of Schizophrenia. New York: Free Association Press.

Tart, C.T. (1969). Altered States of Consciousness. HarperCollins.

Ussher, J. (1991). Women’s Madness: Misogyny or Mental Illness? University of Massachusetts Press.

Watters, E. (2010). Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche. Free Press: Simon & Schuster.

Whitaker. R. (2002). Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill. Cambridge, MA: Perseus.

Whitaker, R. (2010) Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America. Crown Publishing Group (NY).

Pages

Israel Journal of Psychiatry

Improving community mental health services: The need for a paradigm shift

Abstract

Background: It is now over half a century since community care was introduced in the wake of the closure of the old asylum system. This paper considers whether mental health services, regardless of location, can be genuinely effective and humane without a fundamental paradigm shift.

Data: A summary of research on the validity and effectiveness of current mental health treatment approaches is presented. Limitations: The scope of the topic was too broad to facilitate a systematic review or meta-analyses, although reviews with more narrow foci are cited.

Conclusions: The move to community care failed to facilitate a more psychosocial, recovery-focused approach, instead exporting the medical model and its technologies, often accompanied by coercion, into a far broader domain than the hospital. There are, however, some encouraging signs that the long overdue paradigm shift may be getting closer.

Authors: Longden, Eleanor. Read, John. & Dillon, Jacqui.

Published in: Israel Journal of Psychiatry and Related Sciences, 53(1), pp. 22-30.

Date: 10 Feb 2017

Link: https://doctorsonly.co.il/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/05_Longden_Improving-Community.pdf

Phoenix

Making Sense of Madness: An emancipatory approach

7 July 2017, 10 am – 4.30pm, registration from 9.30am

Hackney House, 25-27 Curtain Road, Hackney, London, EC2A 3LT

https://madness-london.eventbrite.co.uk

This unique, one day event, featuring Jacqui Dillon and Rai Waddingham (recently featured on BBC Horizon: Why Did I Go Mad?), explores experiences often dismissed as symptoms of serious mental illness: voices, visions, paranoia, unusual beliefs and altered states, and reframes them as understandable human responses to adversity.

Drawing from personal and professional experiences of madness, healing and recovery, combined with emerging innovative research findings, Jacqui and Rai present an emancipatory approach to understanding and working with distressing experiences that prioritises respect, personal meaning, self-determination and liberation.

Download: Making Sense of Madness Flyer

It includes:

  • Understanding ‘mad’ experiences
  • Exploring factors that can contribute to and shape distress
  • Alternatives to diagnosis – moving beyond the illness model
  • Respectful ways of helping people in distress
  • Strategies to survive and thrive

This day is suitable for:

  • Anyone interested in understanding more about madness, creativity and the complex spectrum of human experience
  • Those involved in supporting another human beinga – whether this is as a friend, ally, family member, colleague, mental health professional, teacher, therapist, social worker, voluntary sector worker, manager or spiritual advisor
  • All those with lived experience of madness and distress

Fees:

  • Unwaged: £10
  • Voluntary Sector & Self Funding: £90
  • Statutory & Commercial: £125

Please get in touch if you’re in a difficult financial position – we may be able to help.

Register:

https://madness-london.eventbrite.co.uk

Maudsley Debates – Enabling or Labelling?

This House believes that psychiatric diagnosis has advanced the care of people with mental health problems.

Wednesday 5th June, 6pm (refreshments served from 5.30pm)

To coincide with the publication of the 5th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), sometimes described as the “Bible” of American psychiatry, the Institute of Psychiatry is hosting a debate on the issue of psychiatric diagnosis.  Some argue that a rigorously  standardised system of classification of mental disorders forms an essential role in conceptualising a patient’s problem, in predicting what treatments are likely to be effective, and in conducting valid scientific research.  Others consider psychiatric diagnoses to be no more than labels, which lack scientific and predictive validity and serve only to stigmatise and objectify those who suffer from mental disorders.  These issues will be debated in the 48th Maudsley Debate on Wednesday 5 June at 6pm at the Wolfson Lecture Theatre, Institute of Psychiatry, Denmark Hill.  The motion is “This House believes that psychiatric diagnosis has advanced the care of people with mental health problems.”  

Speaking for the motion:

Prof Norman Sartorius, former president of the World Psychiatric Association

Prof Anthony David, Professor of Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, Institute of Psychiatry

Speaking against the motion:

Dr Felicity Callard, Senior Lecturer in Social Science for Medical Humanities, Durham University and Chair of the Board, Mental Disability Advocacy Center

Dr Pat Bracken, Clinical Director of Mental Health in West Cork and author of “Post- Psychiatry: Mental Health in a Post-Modern World”.  

Chair:  Sir Simon Wessely, Professor of Psychological Medicine and Vice Dean for Academic Psychiatry, Institute of Psychiatry

 Wolfson Lecture Theatre, Institute of Psychiatry Main Building, De Crespigny Park, London SE5 8AF

Contact: Hannah Baker

For further information please see: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/iop/news/debates/index.aspx 

The Hearing Voices Network – “The Freedom to Hear Voices”: The Hearing Voices Movement

Psychology, Mental Health and Distress is a groundbreaking new text from John Cromby, David Harper and Paula Reavey. Whereas other texts are structured by diagnostic categories and are biologically reductive, this book places biology as well as the experience of distress itself in its social, cultural and historical context.

 Key Features:

  • Offers a wealth of case stories to portray the reality of living with distress and stimulate class discussion 
  • Fully informed by current experimental, qualitative and theoretical psychological research including research into hearing voices
  • Includes a chapter authored by those with first-hand experience of mental health services, ensuring your students understand the nuances of this emotionally charged and often controversial topic

Features additional contributions by renowned figures including Professor Richard Bentall, Professor John Read, psychiatrist and researcher Joanna Moncreiff and campaigner and Chair of the Hearing Voices Network, Jacqui Dillon among others.

See link for further information: http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?pid=280329

Download flyer: CrombyHarper&Reaveyflyer

 

Hearing Voices Groups: Creating Safe Spaces to Share Taboo Experiences

 

Psychosis as a Personal Crisis seeks to challenge the way people who hear voices are both viewed and treated. This book emphasises the individual variation between people who suffer from psychosis and puts forward the idea that hearing voices is not in itself a sign of mental illness.

In this book the editors bring together an international range of expert contributors, who in their daily work, their research or their personal acquaintance, focus on the personal experience of psychosis.

Further topics of discussion include:

  • accepting and making sense of hearing voices
  • the relation between trauma and paranoia
  • the limitations of contemporary psychiatry
  • the process of recovery.

This book will be essential reading for all mental health professionals, in particular those wanting to learn more about the development of the hearing voices movement and applying these ideas to better understanding those in the voice hearing community.

 

Demedicalising Misery: Psychiatry, Psychology and the Human Condition.

Demedicalising Misery: Psychiatry, Psychology and the Human Condition. Co-edited with Mark Rapley  and Joanna Moncrieff. Published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Thomas Szasz (1960) suggested that the myth of ‘mental illness’ functions to ‘render more palatable the bitter pill of moral conflict in human relations’. The medicalization of distress enables the mental health professions to manage the human suffering that they are confronted with, and also the suspicion that there is little that they can do to help. But the medicalization of misery and madness renders people unable to comprehend their experiences in ordinary, meaningful terms. In this collection we restore to everyday discourse a way of understanding distress that, unlike contemporary psychiatry and psychology, recognises and respects the essential humanness of the human condition. De-medicalizing Misery is a shorthand term for this project. The book resists the psychiatrization and psychologization of human experience, and seeks to place what are essentially moral and political – not medical – matters back at the centre of our understanding of human suffering.

Notes on Contributors
Preface; R.Dallos
Carving Nature at its Joints? DSM and the Medicalization of Everyday Life; M.Rapley, J.Moncrieff & J.Dillon
Dualisms and the Myth of Mental Illness; P.Thomas & P.Bracken
Making the World Go Away, and How Psychology and Psychiatry Benefit; M.Boyle
Cultural Diversity and Racism: An Historical Perspective; S.Fernando
The Social Context of Paranoia; D.J.Harper
From ‘Bad Character’ to BPD: The Medicalization of ‘Personality Disorder’; J.Bourne
Medicalizing Masculinity; S.Timimi
Can Traumatic Events Traumatise People? Trauma, Madness and ‘Psychosis’; L.Johnstone
Children Who Witness Violence at Home; A.Vetere
Discourses of Acceptance and Resistance: Speaking Out About Psychiatry; E.Speed
The Personal Is the Political; J.Dillon
‘I’m Just, You Know, Joe Bloggs’: The Management of Parental Responsibility for First-Episode Psychosis; C.Coulter & M.Rapley
The Myth of the Antidepressant: An Historical Analysis; J.Moncrieff
Antidepressants and the Placebo Response; I.Kirsch
Why Were Doctors so Slow to Recognise Antidepressant Discontinuation Problems?; D.Double
Toxic Psychology; C.Newnes
Psychotherapy: Illusion With No Future?; D.Smail
The Psychologization of Torture; N.Patel
What Is To Be Done?; J.Moncrieff, J.Dillon & M.Rapley
Figure: Papers Using Term ‘Antidepressant’ On Medline 1957-1965
Index

‘Despite longstanding awareness of the limitations of the medical model when applied to difficulties of human behavior and adjustment, the fields of psychiatry and psychology continue to accede to the pressures of medicine and the drug industry in their conceptualization of these human realities. Ironically, however, this medical model, eager as it is to fit so much of people’s experience into diagnostic categories, is a social construction. This book represents a significant effort to de-mystify, de-medicalize, and reclaim important aspects of the human condition.’ – Kenneth D. Keith, Professor, Department of Psychological Sciences, University of San Diego, USA

 

De-Medicalizing Misery has assembled an impressive cast of leading mental health experts. Together they challenge the simplistic and pessimistic biological model of human distress that has, with eager support from the pharmaceutical industry, dominated the mental health field for far too long. This evidence-based, humane and optimistic book not only explains where biological psychiatry went wrong, it spells out the alternatives.’ – John Read, University of Auckland, New Zealand and Editor of ‘Models of Madness’

 

  ‘The psychiatrist or psychologist is expected to do something for every patient sitting in front of him or her, but how robust is the intellectual basis of psychiatric science when psychiatric ‘diseases’ are merely symptom clusters – clustered by us, not by nature? We are in indeed in the age of the medicalization of everyday life, when Lord Layard, economist and architect of the IAPT programme, can write in the BMJ that ‘mental illness’ has taken over from unemployment as our greatest social problem. But what is the test of ‘mental illness’? In DeMedicalizing Misery the authors examine some of the domains lamentably absent from orthodox psychiatry and psychology training programmes, with their medical model focus, and in so doing raise the IQ of the whole debate. And not just for clinicians.’ – Dr Derek Summerfield, Consultant Psychiatrist & Senior Lecturer, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College, London, UK.
 

Authors: MARK RAPLEY is Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of East London, UK. He is the author of The Social Construction of Intellectual Disability, Quality of Life Research and, with Susan Hansen and Alec McHoul, Beyond Help: A Consumers’ Guide to Psychology.
 
JOANNA MONCRIEFF is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mental Health Sciences at University College London, UK and a Practising Consultant Psychiatrist at the North East London Foundation Trust. She has spent her academic career re-evaluating the nature and efficacy of psychiatric drugs and exploring the history and politics of psychiatry. She is the co-chair of the Critical Psychiatry Network, and has campaigned against the dominance of the biomedical approach to psychiatry, the extension of psychiatric coercion and the influence of the pharmaceutical industry, in alliance with service user groups. She is the author of The Myth of the Chemical Cure (Palgrave Macmillan), A Straight Talking Introduction to Psychiatric Drugs, and numerous papers and book chapters.
 
JACQUI DILLON is the National Chair of the Hearing Voices Network, UK, and a Director of Intervoice – the International Network for Training, Education and Research into Hearing Voices. She is a campaigner, international speaker and trainer specialising in hearing voices, psychosis, dissociation and trauma. She is the co-editor of Living with Voices: An Anthology of 50 Voice Hearers’ Stories of Recovery. She has published numerous articles and papers, is on the editorial board of the journal Psychosis: Psychological, Social and Integrative Approaches and is a member of the collective for Asylum, The Magazine for Democratic Psychiatry.


Experts call for ban on schizophrenia ‘label’

Published in: Daily Mail, 9 October, 2006

Schizophrenia should be abolished as a concept because it is unscientific, stigmatising, and does not address the root causes of serious mental illness, a group of experts said today.

The diagnosis, which emerged in the 19th century, is flawed and harmful, they claimed. It not only grouped together patients with widely ranging symptoms, but offered no explanation for their illnesses.

Once given a diagnosis of schizophrenia, a person was labelled an incurable social misfit and placed at the mercy of a psychiatric system that mostly benefited the drug industry.

A new campaign called CASL (Campaign for the Abolition of the Schizophrenic Label) is said to be gaining increasing support from both patients groups and professionals.

It wants patients to be assessed according to their individual experiences and histories rather than blanket-categorised as “schizophrenic”.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-409472/Experts-ban-schizophrenia-label.html#ixzz1H2oOhJEG

Critical & Alternative Perspectives

Critical & Alternative Perspectives

On The Web

The Campaign to Abolish the Schizophrenia Labelwww.caslcampaign.co
CASL is calling for the label of schizophrenia to be abolished on the grounds that it is outdated, unscientific, stigmatising and presents a barrier to effective and appropriate support to individuals diagnosed with the label.

Coming off Psychiatric Medicationwww.comingoff.com
Information about coming off psychiatric medication.

The Critical Psychiatry Networkwww.critpsynet.freeuk.com
The Critical Psychiatry Network provides a network to develop a critique of the contemporary psychiatric system.

The Freedom Centrewww.freedom-center.org
An American-based support and activism community for anyone experiencing mental health difficulties. Includes event lists, links and advice around medication.

The Fireweed Collective – http://theicarusproject.net
Support network started in the U.S. for people ‘navigating the space between brilliance and madness’

The International Critical Psychiatry Networkwww.criticalpsychiatry.net
Created by medical doctors as a forum (primarily for medical doctors) to discuss, critique, and publicise opinions, practices, literature, and events that support critical thinking and alternative approaches to psychiatry.

International Network Toward Alternatives and Recoveryhttp://intar.org/
Gathers prominent survivors, professionals, family members, and advocates from around the world to work together for new clinical and social practices towards emotional distress and what is often labeled as psychosis.

Peter Lehmann Publishingwww.peter-lehmann-publishing.com
Publishes excellent books available in English on alternative approaches to mental health problems.

Mad Pride www.ctono.freeserve.co.uk
The all new website of this energetic mental health surivivors organisation. Includes details of future gigs & events, the origins of Mad Pride and their ‘Stop The Suicides’ campaign

MindFreedom Internationalwww.mindfreedom.org

MindFreedom International unites 100 grassroots groups and thousands of members to win campaigns for human rights of people diagnosed with psychiatric disabilities.

National Service User Networkwww.nsun.org.uk
Aims to create a network which will engage and support the wide diversity of mental health service users and survivors across England in order to strengthen the user voice.

PCCS Bookswww.pccs-books.co.uk
Publisher of counselling and psychotherapy books and journals. Committed to reflexive, radical and critical contemporary psychology theory and practice

Soteria Networkwww.soterianetwork.org.uk
Soteria is a network of people in the UK promoting the development of drug-free and minimum medication therapeutic environments for people experiencing ‘psychosis’ or extreme states.

The Spiritual Crisis Networkwww.spiritualcrisisnetwork.org.uk
A UK based network set up to improve access to approaches that view psychosis as a spiritual crisis or spiritual emergence ideas.

World Network of Users and Survivors of Psychiatryhttp://wnusp.rafus.dk/
WNUSP is an international organization of users and survivors of psychiatry.

In Print

Asylum Magazinewww.asylumonline.net/subscribe.htm
Asylum magazine is a forum for free debate, open to anyone with an interest in psychiatry or mental health. We especially welcome contributions from service users or ex-users (or survivors), carers, and frontline psychiatric or mental health workers (anonymously, if you wish). The magazine is not-for-profit and run by a collective of unpaid volunteers.

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