Mad In America

09/18/2025

In late March, the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, which oversees anti-discrimination enforcement for the Department of Homeland Security, was dissolved. The entire office was found to be “non-essential or not legally mandated,” as were two smaller offices that conducted oversight of the immigration-detention system and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. A spokesperson for D.H.S. referred to the three as “internal adversaries.” Civil-rights mechanisms at Homeland Security were essentially wiped out.

Across the federal government, offices and programs that work to insure equal treatment are increasingly in peril. The Department of Housing and Urban Development cancelled grants that go to poor people with disabilities. The Department of Health and Human Services, a division that helps disabled people and seniors live at home, had its staff cut in half. Trump’s trillion-dollar reduction in Medicaid spending, meanwhile, could make it harder for disabled people to access long-term care. The Department of Labor withdrew a plan to establish a minimum wage for workers with disabilities and abolished wage protections for the home-health aides who assist millions of seniors and disabled people. “Prior to this year, there was such a hope that the needle had moved,” a former employee of D.O.L. who is legally blind told E. Tammy Kim. “Now, I’m looking for employment. Do I even say I’m a person with disabilities?” Read about the impact of Trump’s attack on disability rights: https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/HhE1k4

09/18/2025

The Importance of Grief—in the Psychological Process and in Our Lives
by Iva P***a, PhD

In order to mature and to process our pain, or to process what existentialism calls our givens—things that are unavoidable in our lives and that we cannot change—it is necessary to confront this grief.

Grief helps us to meet the reality of the situation and of the loss we endured. It cannot be emphasized enough that it is processing grief what brings us closer to the reality of situation—and to our more authentic selves.

In order to mature and to process our pain—things that are unavoidable in our lives—it is necessary to confront this grief.

09/18/2025

EVENT NEXT WEEK!

Join us next Thursday, September 25, at 9am PDT, 12pm EDT, 5pm BST, 7pm CEST for a webinar, Navigating Complex Choices in Antipsychotic Reduction, with Helene Speyer, hosted by Ron Unger.

Dr. Helene Speyer discusses the complications of stopping antipsychotics and possibilities for addressing this issue.

09/18/2025

A recent study in Psychology & Sexuality found that collective action may mitigate the adverse mental health effects of critical consciousness among LGBTQ+ young adults.

The research was led by Roberto L. Abreu at the University of Florida, along with colleagues Rodrigo Costa, Teresa Vazquez, and Aldo Barrita. The team surveyed 460 LGBTQ+ young adults in the United States to examine how critical consciousness, collective action, and mental health outcomes are connected across racial and gender identities.

“LGBTQ+ people with higher critical consciousness showed more depression symptoms and anxiety symptoms at low levels of private (but not overall nor public) LGBTQ+ collective action in the overall sample and in White people,” the authors write. “These findings suggest that LGBTQ+ individuals who engage in collective action within their interpersonal relationships are likely to believe that they are contributing to enacting social change, resulting in increased psychological well-being.”

While the findings suggest that private collective action can help buffer mental health risks for some groups, the same does not hold true for transgender and gender-diverse (TGD) individuals and LGBTQ+ people of color, highlighting the urgent need for mental health interventions specifically designed to address the compounded impacts of racism, transphobia, and systemic oppression.

LGBTQ+ young adults who engage in everyday collective action show fewer symptoms of depression and anxiety, but benefits vary across racial and gender lines.

09/17/2025

Individualized Understandings of Mental Health Mislead Us

This article originally appeared on our affiliate site, Mad in South Asia, with the title “What Diagnosis Left Behind: Towards a Situated, Humane Psychology.” The author, Neil Nallan Chakravartula, is an aspiring social and critical psychologist.

Questioning the shortcoming of diagnosis as it separates the person from their world and detaches their pain from their circumstances.

09/17/2025

A new meta-analysis published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry finds that antidepressants are linked to insomnia in children and adolescents.

Researchers reviewed data from more than 5,000 young people in randomized trials and found that treatment with newer-generation antidepressants was associated with a significant increase in sleep problems.

The study, led by Cagdas Türkmen of the University of Heidelberg in Germany, found no significant difference between selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and selective norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs) in terms of the likelihood of insomnia. But risk varied by condition and drug. Young people treated for anxiety disorders were more likely to develop insomnia than those with depression, and sertraline (Zoloft) showed the strongest link.

“The results based on 20 RCTs indicated a 1.65-fold increase in the odds of insomnia in children and adolescents treated with SSRIs or SNRIs compared to those receiving a placebo, suggesting a modest risk of insomnia during the initial 6 to 12 weeks of antidepressant treatment,” the researchers report.

“This corresponds to approximately 6 of 100 pediatric patients experiencing insomnia when receiving antidepressants, as opposed to 4 of 100 when receiving placebo. No significant difference was found between SSRIs and SNRIs with respect to this increased risk of insomnia.”

While these numbers may seem modest at first glance, it’s worth noting that sertraline has long been one of the most commonly prescribed antidepressants, especially to younger service users. In the current work, sertraline is associated with a nearly two-and-a-half-fold increase in the odds of developing treatment-emergent insomnia, which translates to 14 of 100 pediatric service users developing insomnia after exposure to this drug compared to 4 of 100 with a placebo.

The findings add to a growing body of research that raises concerns about both the safety and effectiveness of antidepressants in children and adolescents. While widely prescribed, these drugs remain controversial: the “chemical imbalance” theory that once underpinned their use has been widely discredited, and studies continue to document a range of potential harms.

Sertraline (Zoloft) showed the highest risk, with odds of insomnia more than doubling compared to placebo.

09/16/2025

How Not to Diagnose Your Child

First published on Mad in the UK. An anonymous psychologist discusses the way labels are perpetuated by professionals in an attempt to simplify individual needs for the laypeople who are in charge of providing accommodations—even though those professionals know the labels are invalid and harmful. Saving her own son, Alex, from these labels forms the core of the piece.

From Mad in the UK: The reflections of a mental health professional on saving her own son from invalid and harmful labels.

09/16/2025

We invite you to propose whatever feels most alive and necessary for this gathering. This is not a traditional academic conference. We're creating space for the voices, ways of knowing, and forms of expression that psychology has marginalized. DUE: Thursday, December 4th by 6:14 pm EST (FULL MOON)

09/16/2025

In a new article in the Review of General Psychology, anthropologist Jie Yang of Simon Fraser University argues that modern psychology’s reliance on the “psyche” leaves out something essential. Instead of focusing on the brain or mind as the seat of distress, her research turns to the indigenous concepts of xin in Chinese and kokoro in Japanese, both usually translated as “heart” or “heart-mind.”

“Our shared interest lies in the potential for heart, rather than the psyche, to be the ground for developing a new template of psychological care,” they write.

She describes this heart-based template as both “affective, that is, embodied, sensitive to intensities of feeling emanating from heart-related distress” and “aesthetic, meaning artful and intuitive, because xin, the Chinese term for the heart, which is also the origin of kokoro in Japan, is both body and mind.”

Concepts of xin and kokoro, they note, “suggest an interdependent self, rather than a bounded, individual self, such as the one we associate with tenets of Euro-American psychology and the psyche.”

The study documents how these traditions frame the heart not only as a physical organ but as the ground of cognition, emotion, virtue, and social life. Yang and collaborators describe this approach as “aesthetic attunement”: an artful, embodied way of aligning the self with others, society, and the cosmos. They argue that heart-based care provides healing potential where psychiatric categories like depression and anxiety fall short.

A new cross-cultural study suggests that “aesthetic attunement” through the heart offers a richer, more humane template for mental health care.

09/15/2025

In a 2022 meta-analysis, Marc B. Stone and his colleagues declared a startling finding. On average, antidepressants were little better than placebo pills. However, there appeared to be a small subgroup of patients—about 15%—who derived a large benefit. This group, according to Stone, was offset by another group of patients who derived less benefit than they would from a placebo, while the majority of patients derived about the same benefit as they would from a fake pill.

Thus, according to Stone, researchers should seek a way to identify the small group of patients who actually do well on the drugs.

In a new study, researchers searched for just that. They reanalyzed the data from the most famous antidepressant study, STAR*D. They looked for the unique “trimodal” distribution (three different groups of people) identified by Stone et al.

The problem: they didn’t find it. The researchers were unable to identify any group of patients who did surprisingly well on antidepressants. Instead, they conclude that the small average benefit over placebo—a clinically meaningless difference that is most likely an enhanced placebo effect—is the best way to understand the benefit of antidepressants.

“The trimodal antidepressant response distribution as reported in Stone et al. could not be replicated using data from the STAR*D trial, an open label, non-industry sponsored real-world antidepressant study,” the researchers write. “Therefore, our results do not support the notion that a subgroup of patients with a large response exists. Instead, these findings support the assumption that the putative subgroups from industry RCTs may be artifacts caused by methodological biases.”

The study authors were Colin Xu, Florian Naudet, Thomas T. Kim, Michael P. Hengartner, Mark A. Horowitz, Irving Kirsch, Joanna Moncrieff, Ed Pigott, Martin Plöderl, many of whom have discussed their work on the Mad in America podcast.

A reanalysis of STAR*D finds no support for the theorized subgroup of patients who do well on antidepressants.

09/13/2025

A Call for Retraction: How a Journal Condoned Psychedelic Therapy Abuse
MIA Essay By Will Hall

The paper, “A Qualitative Exploration of Relational Ethical Challenges and Practices in Psychedelic Healing,” needs to be retracted for four reasons. First, the 23 therapists who were interviewed described practices that justify sexual assault of patients under the guise that these practices promote healing. Second, the authors withheld information from the interviews that told of sexual mistreatment of patients under the influence of M**A, and thus published a whitewashed version of their 23 interviews. Third, the lead author failed to disclose that he was a protégé of Aharon Grossbard and Francoise Bourzat, two leading psychedelic therapists facing multiple allegations of sexual abuse widely covered in the media, and that many of the practitioners interviewed for the paper had been trained by Grossbard and Bourzat. Fourth, the paper hid the financial and other conflicts of interests of the principal investigator.

The concealing of relevant data from a research project is a form of fraud and the grounds for retraction of the JHP study.