Recovery Michigan

In the first of our guest opinion posts, Judith Haire shares her thoughts on where money should go in mental health

I’ve experienced mental illness and been on the receiving end of unkind comments. I applaud the Time To Change anti stigma campaign run by the leading mental health charities Mind and Rethink Mental Illness.  One in four adults will experience mental health problems and one in four children. Stigma is a problem that can stop people seeking help, can erode already fragile self-esteem and confidence and can hinder recovery.

Why do we need mental health social entrepreneurship?

A business that can pay for itself can expand as rapidly as the infrastructure can be created. This would mean a mental health system so cheap that folks in emotional distress could pay for all of their own help back to a life of their own choosing. As Paul Polak points out in Out of Poverty, having people as customers instead of charity recipients makes a difference in many ways – people can choose between competing services, people can sell product and work in the business, and the business is more likely to have a product designed specifically for the needs of the customer. The most important difference is that being a charity recipient is disempowering, takes away choice, and makes people not want to create their own solutions to problems because they instead wait on further charity. Many of the homeless folks I worked with told me, “I can’t get a job, I’m waiting on my disability determination.”

This Saturday, 12 Nov. 2011 occupy the psychiatric industry with 2 special psychiatric survivor guests: C.J. LINCE (photo right) launched a "people's" response to psychiatry's label bible. ERICK FABRIS of Toronto will be in the MFI studio about his new book exposing the practice of forced psychiatric drugging of people in their own homes, out in the community. Host: David Oaks, MFI director.

Psychiatric survivor cj lince has a response to the harm of psychiatric labels - label ourselves with the People's DSM!

Occupy the Psychiatric Industry!

This Saturday, 12 November 2011, at 2 pm ET, 11 am PT, your calls are welcome on this live free MindFreedom web radio show, click here:

www.blogtalkradio.com/davidwoaks

Two Special Guests:

• C.J. Lince (photo upper right) has a unique approach to "Boycotting Normal" called the "People's DSM," turning the tables on psychiatric labeling. 
• Erick Fabris (photo right) is a psychiatric survivor and mad pride activist, author of a new book on the human rights violation of forcibly drugging people living in their own homes, while living out in the community: "Tranquil Prisons: Chemical Incarceration Under Community Treatment Orders."
• Host David Oaks is a psychiatric survivor activist for the past 35 years, and director of MindFreedom International. He works with Occupy Eugene.

 

At the start of the show, 2 pm ET or 11 am PT, you can go directly to the Blog Talk Radio site hosting the monthly "Second Saturday" show, here:

www.blogtalkradio.com/davidwoaks

There you can listen and call in LIVE, or hear the archive later.

Call-in Number: (646) 595-2125.

This Saturday, 12 Nov. 2011 occupy the psychiatric industry with 2 special psychiatric survivor guests: C.J. LINCE (photo right) launched a "people's" response to psychiatry's label bible. ERICK FABRIS of Toronto will be in the MFI studio about his new book exposing the practice of forced psychiatric drugging of people in their own homes, out in the community. Host: David Oaks, MFI director.

In what is believed to be the first study of its kind to demonstrate an association between the antidepressant escitalopram and improved general pain, researchers from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM), have found that opioid-dependent patients treated with escitalopram experienced meaningful reductions in pain severity and pain interference during the first three months of therapy. These findings appear in the journal Pain.

Your ability to recognize emotional content in faces and texts is linked to your blood pressure, according to a Clemson University researcher.

A recently published study by Clemson University psychology professor James A. McCubbin and colleagues has shown that people with higher blood pressure have reduced ability to recognize angry, fearful, sad and happy faces and text passages

Now a group of people with the diagnosis is showing researchers a previously hidden dimension of the story: how the disorder can be managed while people build full, successful lives. The continuing study — a joint project of the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of Southern California; and the Department of Veterans Affairs — follows a group of 20 people with the diagnosis, including two doctors, a lawyer and a chief executive, Ms. Myrick.

White men over 80 years old are at the greatest risk of all age, gender, and racial groups for suicide. The rate for this group is six times the current overall rate and three times the rate of African-American males over 80 years old. This is troublesome because the oldest-old group (85> years) is the most rapidly growing sub-population of elderly adults in the United States. 

Propelled by an increase in prescription narcotic overdoses, drug deaths now outnumber traffic fatalities in the United States, a Times analysis of government data has found.

Drugs exceeded motor vehicle accidents as a cause of death in 2009, killing at least 37,485 people nationwide, according to preliminary data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

While most major causes of preventable death are declining, drugs are an exception. The death toll has doubled in the last decade, now claiming a life every 14 minutes. By contrast, traffic accidents have been dropping for decades because of huge investments in auto safety.

Wednesday September 14th 2011

Somewhere between 4 and 13% of people hear voices that others don’t. Despite this, voice-hearing remains a stigmatised and isolating experience in many parts of the world.

World Hearing Voices Day celebrates hearing voices as part of the diversity of human experience, increasing awareness of the fact that you can hear voices and be healthy. It challenges the negative attitudes towards people who hear voices and the incorrect assumption that hearing voices, in itself, is a sign of illness.