Mad In America

11/25/2025

We Need a Culture That Embraces Emotion Instead of Numbing It
by Marcus Orlando

Medicating depression and anxiety does nothing to address their root cause. SSRIs clear away the smoke without putting out the flame.

Medicating depression and anxiety does nothing to address their root cause. SSRIs clear away the smoke without putting out the flame.

11/25/2025

A new article published in Research in Social and Administrative Pharmacy finds that time constraints, conflicting priorities, and fear of relapse of mental health issues were the main barriers to healthcare professionals assisting in the discontinuation of antidepressants.

The chief enabler of stopping antidepressant use was knowledge and skills about how to discontinue these drugs and access to support safely. The current work, led by Bethany Atkins from the University of Leicester in the UK, additionally finds that the most common interventions for increasing antidepressant discontinuation rates include training for healthcare professionals (HCPs) and increased availability of information about tapering. These interventions showed mixed results in increasing discontinuation rates.

The authors write:

“Provision of knowledge and skills to HCPs around antidepressant treatment and discontinuation, as well as access to alternatives to antidepressants to provide to patients, are both enablers that require addressing in an intervention to support primary care HCPs to discontinue antidepressants that are no longer needed. Insufficient time, lack of access to alternatives to antidepressants, fear of relapse and an expectation that patients initiate antidepressant discontinuation discussions are barriers reported in the research literature … However, existing interventions fail to address the barriers that HCPs report, which may explain the limited success in increasing antidepressant discontinuation.”

Researchers found that for many doctors, renewing antidepressant prescriptions feels safer and faster than helping people taper, and that most current interventions fail to address the pressures driving that choice.

11/25/2025

Social media sites are increasingly focused on delivering short-form video (SFV). TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts are dedicated to this type of content, which often lasts just a few seconds. Researchers have expressed concern that SFV is negatively impacting cognition and attention and worsening mental health, particularly among children and young adults.

Now, a new study has analyzed all the available data on these outcomes. Their conclusion? Spending time viewing this content has a deleterious effect on attention and inhibition, as well as anxiety and stress.

“Our synthesis of 71 studies revealed that greater engagement with these platforms is associated with poorer cognitive and mental health in both youths and adults,” the researchers write.

The study, conducted by researchers at Griffith University, Australia, was led by Lan Nguyen and published in Psychological Bulletin.

Social media’s increasing use of algorithm-driven content that lasts only seconds may be worsening attention, inhibition, stress, and anxiety

11/25/2025

Learn about the proposal types being accepted for APA's 2025 convention and deadlines for submitting.

11/24/2025

Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT): It’s Not Just the Memory Loss
by Chris Harrop

A new study shows ECT can cause disastrous health and cognitive problems, and chronic impairments across many day-to-day activities.

A new study shows ECT can cause disastrous health and cognitive problems, and chronic impairments across many day-to-day activities.

11/22/2025

Women Likely to Be Retraumatised by ECT: Disturbing Findings from a New Survey
by Lisa Morrison

The widespread use of ECT on women needs to be understood from a trauma-informed perspective.

The use of ECT on women needs to be understood from a trauma-informed perspective. When I was most vulnerable, my rights were not protected.

11/21/2025

Living Protracted
by Robyn Stojanovic

Protracted withdrawal has taken so much from so many of us—years of our lives, our identities, our relationships, and the chance to simply feel safe in our own bodies and minds.

I never set out to become the face or voice for long-term psych med injury. This isn’t how anyone would want their life to end up, but as the years passed and life continued without me, I realised I could no longer hide in silence. And I reluctantly speak out because of necessity—not just for myself, but for all of us who have been left behind, misdiagnosed, or misunderstood.

Protracted withdrawal has taken so much from so many of us—years of our lives, our identities, our relationships, and the chance to simply feel safe in our own bodies and minds.

11/21/2025

A new open-access consensus statement in EcoHealth argues that human health cannot be understood apart from the ecosystems people inhabit. The authors propose “Ecological Medicine,” a framework that treats health as an interdependency between humans, other species, and the environments that support them.

Led by psychiatrist Michael Makhinson, the Ecological Medicine Working Group brought together 73 experts from medicine, public health, ecology, psychology, Indigenous studies, and other fields. Using a structured consensus process, they developed a definition, set of priorities, and practical implications for a connectivity-based approach to care. The authors write:

“Adoption of a connectivity-based health framework which expands the current biomedical model to multiple levels of inter-connectivity and recognizes profound interdependencies between human beings, other living elements of nature, and the natural environment, would be beneficial to human health and to the health of the biosphere.”

The statement offers a conceptual blueprint for reorienting health care away from isolated individuals and toward networks of relationships. For mental health in particular, the authors argue that distress and resilience emerge within webs of connections to self, to other people, to other living beings, and to the land.

From social prescribing to forest bathing, a proposed Ecological Medicine model ties recovery to the quality of our relationships with the world around us.

11/20/2025

Where the Bullet Stayed
Yishay Ishi Ronron.1

Writing became the space between pain and acceptance, the only place where both could coexist without one needing to kill the other.

Writing became the space between pain and acceptance, the only place where both could coexist without one needing to kill the other.

11/20/2025

Coordinated Specialty Care (CSC) programs for young people experiencing early psychosis often promise to help them get back into life through work, school, and social connections. A new qualitative study describes what that actually looks like on the ground, beyond job programs and family meetings.

In a paper published in the Community Mental Health Journal, Elizabeth C. Thomas of Temple University and colleagues surveyed and interviewed leaders of CSC programs across the United States to map how they support community participation in everyday life.

“Coordinated Specialty Care (CSC) programs for young adults with early psychosis aim to promote community participation; however, research on practices beyond those focused on employment, education, and family relationships is limited,” the authors write.

“Many express a desire to engage in other aspects of community life, including the arts, spirituality/religion, sports, civic engagement, and friend and intimate relationships. … Understanding the factors influencing the implementation of community participation practices within CSCs is an essential next step.”

The study offers rare detail on what programs are doing, what gets in the way, and how community life is framed as a form of “medical necessity” for people with experiences of psychosis. The participants treat participation in ordinary community life as central to “recovery,” not as an afterthought to symptom management. The paper also exposes the gap between rights-based aspirations for inclusion and the uneven realities inside U.S. early psychosis services.

Interviews with program leaders reveal how Coordinated Specialty Care teams try to make community life a “medical necessity” rather than an afterthought.

11/19/2025

Safa Askeri joins Brooke Siem on the Mad in America to discuss his experience of antidepressant withdrawal and the gaslighting he was subjected to as he raised concerns with his doctors.

Read or listen to the full interview here:

Maybe you have this interpretation that you're not going to recover and you have permanent damage, but it's not like that. I'm very hopeful.

11/19/2025

A study in Nature Mental Health suggests that children living in U.S. states with higher income inequality tended, on average, to show very small differences in brain structure and connectivity. Some of these brain measures statistically accounted for a portion of the association between inequality and children’s later self-reported mental health problems.

Led by Divyangana Rakesh of the University of Cambridge, with co-authors Dimitris Tsomokos, Teresa Vargas, Kate Pickett, and Vikram Patel, the study analyzes MRI and questionnaire data from more than 10,000 children in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study and links them to state-level income inequality. The authors interpret these subtle patterns as support for viewing income inequality as a social determinant of young people’s mental health

One of the study’s authors, Vikram Patel of Harvard, described the results to the Kings College London News Center:

“These findings add to the growing literature which demonstrates how social factors, in this instance income inequality, can influence well-being through pathways which include structural changes in the brain.”

There is now substantial evidence that unequal societies have higher rates of mental distress. There is a growing effort in developmental neuroscience to show how social conditions such as poverty and inequality might become “embedded” in the brain. However, this framing can risk suggesting that children who grow up in more unequal places are biologically different or even deficient, as if injustice resides in their brains rather than in the social and economic arrangements around them. It also raises questions about what very small statistical effects in huge datasets can tell us about real children’s lives, and about how best to argue for policies that reduce inequality.

A large U.S. imaging study links income inequality to subtle brain measures and slightly higher youth distress.