The following linked-to article does a fairly good job of explaining clinical depression. Clinical Depression Is Not Sadness The reader should take note of how hard the writer had to work to explain what clinical depression is not - rather than what it is. Many an article attempts to clear up the misunderstanding but leaves … Continue reading Clinical Depression – Misunderstood

The title of this brief post is abstracted from the preface to a white paper produced by the Council of State Governments Justice Center.  CSGJC is passively critical of the behavioral health community's tendency to distance themselves from the criminalized "4 percent", yet fails to recognize that their own positions (undergirded by controversial research studies), … Continue reading Behavioral Health Community: ‘Public Safety is Not Their Mission’, Really?

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/591e2496e4b07617ae4cbaac This article written by Julie A. Fast is one of the best articles on the web on the topic of suicide in severe mental illness.  Ms. Fast is an expert in educating the public on Bipolar Disorder. ...About Ms. Fast's comment about why and how she escaped death in the moment of crisis: It … Continue reading Suicide in Serious Mental Illness is often “Accidental”

A link to the following essay was posted on the FB page of Families for Treatment of Serious Mental Illness months ago. Unfortunately, the horror this Pennsylvania family experienced is all too common, predictable, and avoidable. These tragedies are products of well-defined choices that legislators and agencies of government have made to drive people afflicted … Continue reading Tragedy By Choice – When Government Prefers to Punish Rather Than Protect

A link to the following article is dual-posted to this page and the About Psychosis page. Excerpt: "This disease has been misunderstood for 4,000 years" It is unlikely that the researchers in this study experienced an epiphany about the biological root cause of Schizophrenia. My take on this article is that science is slowly discovering … Continue reading The world is still misunderstanding Schizophrenia even in the age of neuroscience.

People who lack a strong conceptual understanding of psychosis-spectrum disorders (and that characterizes most of the humans on the planet) will fail to see what is wrong with this legal test of insanity.   This wikipedia entry for M'Naghten's Rule gives an account of the history of this legal test as it has been applied … Continue reading What’s Wrong with M’Naghten’s Rule

GBMI is a product of misunderstanding of serious mental illness, a rejection of insanity, and the unquenched thirst for vengeance.  The lesser charge against this verdict is that it is a mockery of the convicted person.  The most serious charge is that it is a grotesque violation of the moral and ethical principles of justice.  … Continue reading Guilty But Mentally Ill – A bizarre and unnecessary verdict

The quote is from this article: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/the-smartphone-psychiatrist/528726/ It seems like every shimmering insight into disorders of the mind over the past century has become the subject of intractable controversy. The terminologies ‘brain’ and ‘mind’ are not interchangeable, however, the mind is a composition of certain functionalities of the brain and all of the neural processes … Continue reading “The gap between what we know and what we do is unacceptable.” Dr. Thomas Insel

Due justice Project has called for society to take a proactive approach to violence prevention in serious mental illness.  The following is a link to an article on violence prevention that is dual-posted to the Blog and About Psychosis pages.  https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/07/170717091015.htm Society is going to have to come to terms with the fact that there … Continue reading Science Daily Article: Early screening for psychosis may prevent violence

Link: Mentally Ill Put To Death In Disproportionate Numbers There is a reason why we should find people with SMI being killed by The State in much greater numbers than they are represented in the general public.  The 'common criminal' without a diagnosable SMI commits crimes that generally look different from those committed by someone in the throes of psychosis … Continue reading WP Article: Does Death Penalty Target Mentally Ill?