“Once I became my diagnosis, there was no one left to recover.” Yesterday's Pat Deegan post led me to Dr. Daniel Fisher's work on mental illness recovery. He promotes an "empowerment" model of recovery that he contrasts with a "rehabilitation" model of recovery. According to this vision, one is capable of recovering from the mental … Continue reading “Disease” and recovery
Tag: science
An exciting time for pharma
Ugh! This Join Together article reads like a ad for pharma: Many people struggling with alcohol dependence who could benefit from medication are not receiving it, according to an expert who spoke at the recent American Psychiatric Association Annual Meeting. “Antidepressant prescribing is 100 to 200 times as great as prescriptions for medications approved to … Continue reading An exciting time for pharma
Hard to kill
Nature has a new article on the troubling shelf life of bad psychology research: Positive results in psychology can behave like rumours: easy to release but hard to dispel. They dominate most journals, which strive to present new, exciting research. Meanwhile, attempts to replicate those studies, especially when the findings are negative, go unpublished, languishing in … Continue reading Hard to kill
Emotional pain without context
Siddhartha Mukherjee provides a brief history of the serotonin hypothesis of depression, its demise and why dismissing serotonin may be an "overcorrection." Part of this story is an emerging theory of depression: A remarkable and novel theory for depression emerges from these studies. Perhaps some forms of depression occur when a stimulus — genetics, environment … Continue reading Emotional pain without context
Why we can’t agree
The Obama administration just released their annual drug control strategy report and all the headlines say it emphasizes treatment over incarceration. Sounds great, but the stories are short on details. Others, from the Drug Policy Alliance are dismissing it as more of the same. More of the same? Really? I think Obama's safely within the … Continue reading Why we can’t agree
Recovery Review 