#critical-psychiatry

#critical-psychiatry

Doyle's death at Above It All is one of several preventable deaths that Walter investigates in Rehab. The case exemplifies systemic failures in addiction treatment.

In 1925, Sukhareva clearly described older boys who were writing for a school newspaper in a great literary style, playing musical instruments, creating art, connecting deeply with nature and select individuals, and holding on to their ethical principles. They also had sensory sensitivities, limited motor coordination, intense idiosyncratic interests, and difficulties with socializing.

Psychotherapy and counselling psychology, however, did not emerge from institutional logic. The field was forged within relational, psychoanalytic, and depth-oriented traditions that prioritize lived experience, symbolic meaning, cultural complexity, and human nuance over procedural standardization. Bureaucracy seeks predictability, yet psychotherapy was built upon a disciplined engagement with uncertainty.

Evidence Based Medicine was formalized in the 1990s, largely by Canadian physician David Sackett. Sackett described the goal of EBM is to replace hunches and habits with data and clinical trials. Clinical guidelines were developed involving protocols that tell doctors which drug to prescribe first, what dose to use, when to escalate treatment, and when to refer a patient to a specialist.

The movie opens with a brief prologue. A family is driving at night. They hit something on the road, which turns out to be a dog, and the dog dies. The daughter in the back seat is visibly upset. The mother consoles her by saying, "It was just an accident-Dad didn't do it on purpose." Then the title appears, and the main story begins.

Depression is insidious. For people suffering from depression, joy is elusive. Depression is not only a general feeling of sadness or being down and out. It is a serious condition and needs attention. People suffering from depression cannot just get over it and move on. They need support, healing, and to discover the epicenter of their pain.

been ignored, neglected, minimized, or dismissed by mainstream psychology but can no longer be denied or avoided without serious consequences. As C.G. Jung (1961) presciently put it, "Today we need psychology for reasons that involve our very existence. . . . We stand face to face with the terrible question of evil and do not even know what is before us let alone what to pit against it."

Do you blame others for the choices you are making? Have you blamed others for the previous choices you have made? To shed more light on these questions, you might also ask yourself: "What am I responsible for, and what power do I have?" From there, you might agree with this self-reflective response: "I am responsible for, and I've got the power over what I think, do, say, learn, and choose" (Purje, 2014).

Anyone who is under psychiatric care, or loves someone who is, may want to read the book The Devil's Castle: Nazi Eugenics, Euthanasia, and How Psychiatry's Troubled History Reverberates Today, by Susanne Paola Antonetta. If you care about history, particularly the history of eugenics, you may be interested as well. The book may offer us more respect for the mind, for consciousness, and its diversity.

It is easy to be good in a good world. What is difficult is to be good in an evil world, where the egoism of others and the egoism built into the institutions of society attack us and threaten to annihilate us. Under such conditions, the only possible reaction would seem to be to oppose evil with evil, egoism with egoism, hate with hate; in short, to annihilate the aggressor with his own weapons.

A large global study across 69 countries found something unexpected: the more individualistic a society is, the more similar people are in how they feel-and in how they want to feel. Across 59 out of 60 emotions, emotional experiences showed greater uniformity in individualistic cultures. This challenges the common assumption that collectivistic cultures are emotionally restrictive because they suppress individuality. In fact, emotional life in individualistic societies appears to be shaped by strong shared norms that dictate which emotions are acceptable, desirable, or problematic-especially regarding negative emotions.

They arrive on time, think clearly, and care about their clients. Outwardly, everything seems fine. In private, though, things can feel very different. A clinician's depression may not show up as clear despair. More often, it feels like emotional numbness, quietly withdrawing, or slowly losing interest in things that once mattered. Pleasure fades, curiosity lessens, and the work goes on, but it feels heavier and less alive.

Calling clients resistant often implies the client is intentionally blocking progress, as if they alone are the reason therapy isn't working. That framing has always troubled me, because more often than not, what gets labeled "resistance" isn't a client problem at all. I've found that it's usually a relationship problem ( between client(s) and therapist or in their interactions/dynamic), and often, it's actually a therapist problem.