Edited with Claude. Voiceover by Aurora at Evernote. Image by vidIQ.

Mikhaila Peterson Fuller — podcaster and daughter of psychologist Jordan Peterson — recently launched a website called Prescribed Harm, dedicated to educating patients and physicians about medication risks and pushing for regulatory reform around informed consent and patient safety.

I submitted my personal story, and it has now been published on their Stories page under both the SSRIs and Benzodiazepines sections. I also submitted it for the Stolen Lives page at AntidepressantRisks.org.

You can read a copy of my personal story below, a succinct summary of 1,029 words. It summarizes my life from my first Paxil prescription at 19 through my forced electroshock treatment, to over two decades of medication dependence, before withdrawing from my last psychiatric drug in 2024.

To read more stories like mine and find helpful resources for dealing with medication adverse effects, visit the Prescribed Harm website.

Content note: discusses medication-induced suicide attempts, psychiatric abuse, and forced medical treatment.

My Story of Prescribed Harm

As a teenager in the 1990s, I was very shy and my mood was often low. I struggled emotionally in high school but became academically ambitious in my first year of college — still mostly isolated, with hardly any friends. My parents kept sending me to a psychiatrist. Although I initially refused her suggestion to start Paxil after she diagnosed me with depression, near the end of freshman year in 2002, I decided to try it. I gained a lot of weight, became sleepy and lethargic, and my personality was subtly changed. By the end of college in 2005, I decided the Paxil hadn’t really helped and I didn’t like not feeling like myself. My primary care physician said I could taper off by halving the dose a few times over a few weeks. I did, and things seemed fine at first.

A few months after graduation, under stress from employment and family pressures, I reached a breaking point. Verbal abuse from an aunt I was living with triggered feelings of total failure and suicidal thoughts. I attempted suicide by overdose, went into cardiac arrest and nearly died, and was hospitalized at San Francisco General Hospital. After recovering, I was placed on Celexa and returned to my parents in Connecticut — but I still felt agitated and suicidal. I jumped off an overpass, breaking my feet, lower legs, and fracturing my spine and skull.

I was hospitalized at Hartford Hospital’s Institute of Living, put on lithium and Seroquel (mainly for insomnia I hadn’t had before — which, in hindsight, was likely triggered by Celexa). I still wanted to die and was declared to have “treatment-resistant depression.” Not once was it suggested that I might be suffering from Paxil withdrawal syndrome, or that SSRIs could be causing suicidal ideation in someone my age. The doctors became threatening, saying ECT was my last resort, and obtained a probate court order to force it on me. They did it 16 times.

It was the most traumatic experience of my life. It cognitively impaired me significantly — I had been an English major and voracious reader, but afterward it was difficult to get through a single page of text. Following conversations and watching TV became difficult. I also had memory loss. I resisted at points, screaming, even swallowing a napkin in front of nurses to try to stop the procedure — because eating before anesthesia is forbidden. They did it anyway. I aspirated and had to be taken to the emergency room to have my breathing corrected. At one point I said it felt like being raped. Each time, they treated me like a crazy person who shouldn’t be taken seriously. Eventually I started lying — pretending the ECT had helped, that I no longer wanted to die — and only then did they agree to stop.

I continued taking lithium, Seroquel, and Celexa because I genuinely believed I was severely mentally ill. I got off lithium after a few years, but every time I tried to stop Seroquel or my antidepressant, I developed overwhelming insomnia, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts. I interpreted this as proof I had severe depression that required medication. Briefly I also tried Abilify and developed restless akathisia for 1-2 weeks but was able to recognize it and stopped it quickly, and it went away. For a few years, I took the benzodiazepine Klonopin, developed tolerance and dependence-related panic attacks I never had before, and had to be weaned off of it in a hospital. I lived on disability benefits, food stamps, subsidized housing, and other welfare programs — despite having been a high-achieving college student with excellent grades and several academic awards.

In 2018, a severe flu and neurological disorder forced me to stop Seroquel because I had become oversensitive to it, and it made me so drowsy I couldn’t get out of bed until the late afternoon. The withdrawal was brutal — I couldn’t sleep for about three days, and my sleep remained very poor. In 2021, still on Lexapro, I learned about antidepressant dependence and withdrawal syndromes. It became clear that back in 2005, what I had suffered was Paxil withdrawal — and that it’s unlikely I would have become suicidal from ordinary life stressors alone, had my nervous system not been in that state. I learned about hyperbolic tapering and began a taper that took about three years, finishing near the end of 2024. It was still difficult — triggering anxiety and insomnia — but far more manageable than my previous attempts.

Coming off the medication felt like emerging from a fog and a time machine. I had lost myself at around age 19 when I first took Paxil. As my baseline emotions and former personality slowly returned, I found myself in my 40s, mentally in many ways still catching up from where I had been as a teenager, but physically feeling decades older from everything my body had been through. Over months, my emotions became more grounded. An underlying nervous agitation that had seemed chronic slowly dissipated, probably a residual symptom from medication that I didn’t even recognize before.

I have had to come to terms with the profound injustice of what the mental healthcare system did to me — turning a formerly healthy, high-functioning teenager into a physically and cognitively disabled adult who never got to develop socially and emotionally the way most people do. I feel half-alive. I was betrayed and abused by psychiatry, and there is little legal or financial recourse available: statutes of limitations, the difficulty of proving adverse effects in court, and attorneys who generally won’t take mental health cases. I remain dependent on government welfare to survive.

I now know that the study used to get Paxil approved for adolescent depression was fraudulent. Psychiatry is deeply corrupted by pharmaceutical companies that minimize adverse effects and attribute them to patients’ alleged mental illnesses. When I think back to how much healthier I was as a teenager — and how the psychiatrist rolled her eyes when I said I was angry at the world’s injustices — I feel a bitter recognition: my teenage self was right, the world is even more unjust than I understood then, and psychiatry is one of the worst parts of it.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrisjamesdubey.substack.com

Edited with Google Gemini and Claude. Voiceover by Lyra at Evernote.

Content note: Discusses forced medical treatment, torture, medication-induced suicide and murder.

It’s been a while since I’ve shared any updates, and I have several to share.

At a Glance

* Media Coverage: In response to Jim Flannery’s report about increasing petitions for involuntary ECT, I've been interviewed by several reporters.

* Memoir: I’m now writing it myself, at my own pace, to ensure accuracy.

* CCHR Documentary: A new film on psychiatric drugs and violence is worth watching, with caveats.

* Activism: The Stop ECT campaign and the Written Informed Consent Act both warrant attention.

* UN Complaint: I formally submitted a human rights report to the United Nations Human Rights Council.

Media Coverage

Over the last several months, I had the honor of being interviewed by five reporters about my experience with forced electroshock treatment — commonly known by the medical euphemism “electroconvulsive therapy” or ECT. For an in-depth discussion of my experiences as a psychiatric patient and what I’ve learned about psychiatry, see my written testimony for a Connecticut state bill in 2025.

The articles published so far:

* Mad in America (Dec. 6): Fellow psychiatric survivor Jim Flannery obtained official state data on forced ECT petitions filed to Connecticut probate courts from 2012 to 2024, graphed it, and published his analysis. The numbers are startling: a huge jump in petitions beginning in 2015, with an increasing trend through 2024.

* CCHR (Dec.): The first interview of me, by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights International — more on CCHR below.

* Connecticut Examiner (Feb. 8): Reporter Amy Wu interviewed me and my mother, as well as Dr. Javeed Sukhera (current chief of psychiatry at the Institute of Living), history professor Jonathan Sandowsky, Kathy Flaherty of the Connecticut Legal Rights Project, and Jim Flannery.

* Freedom (Feb. 16): An article by John Blosser in Scientology’s magazine.

* Inside Investigator (March 1): Marc Fitch’s piece for this nonprofit investigative newsroom, also drawing on Flannery’s data.

One more reporter’s story is still pending release.

I’m grateful to all the reporters for their time and effort. That said, all the published articles contain minor inaccuracies or misleading statements — nothing too important, but worth noting.

I also wish Amy Wu and Marc Fitch had given more space to some related issues I tried to raise in my interviews: psychiatry’s diagnostic unreliability, prescribing cascades, and why psychiatric diagnoses are flawed — specifically, how adverse psychiatric drug effects have often been misinterpreted by mental health professionals as worsening of underlying disorders. These fundamental flaws in mental healthcare have led to unwarranted prescribing and increased use of more invasive interventions like ECT. I understand that professional journalists are constrained by deadlines, word limits, and the breadth of what they’re covering. I’m still grateful.

The CCHR and Scientology’s Freedom magazine articles also contain minor inaccuracies, but they provide the fullest descriptions of what I experienced and allude to the dangers of psychiatric medications, which were pivotal in my suicide attempts.

Traditional psychiatry, based on faulty biomedical reductionism, often pathologizes normal and healthy mental states. Beyond overdiagnosis and overprescription, it also overlooks and misdiagnoses valid physical disorders that present with psychological symptoms. The best discussion I’ve seen of why traditional psychiatric diagnosis is flawed — though long and highly technical — is the 2019 report by Belgium’s Superior Health Council: DSM (5): The use and status of diagnosis and classification of mental health problems.

Status of My Memoir

I stopped working with the professional writer who had been hired to help me with a memoir of my experiences with ECT. I’m now working on a rough outline on my own. Writing it myself at my own pace seems the only way to accurately describe what I went through — no one else really knows all of it, and it’s so easy to misinterpret or fail to understand another person’s experiences without having lived through them.

But it’s not currently my top priority. I have significant personal issues I’ve been dealing with: continuous pain from my neurological disorder since 2018, getting ready to move back to my hometown of Middletown by May, and being tired of having this body and this life. But the outline continues.

CCHR’s New Documentary on Psychiatric Drugs and Violence

In December, CCHR released a new documentary: Prescription for Violence: Psychiatry’s Deadly Side Effects. It’s unlikely to interest people who support traditional mental healthcare, but I found it very good and highly recommend it — with the warning that it discusses (with some graphic detail) suicides, murders, and mass murders. You can watch it at CCHR’s website or on the Scientology Network.

The documentary contains disturbing revelations by attorneys, healthcare professionals, and doctors working for government and the pharmaceutical industry, including Dr. Alastair Benbow of pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline, Dr. Thomas Laughren who oversaw psychotropic drug approval at the FDA, and Dr. Thomas Insel, former Director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).

While it can be difficult for some people to believe that psychiatric drugs cause suicides and murders, I was already familiar with several of the suicide cases, and they are quite credible. These are people who were dealing with relatively ordinary or mild-to-moderate stressors, who were pathologized as “mentally ill” and prescribed psychotropic drugs with devastating results — including Natalie Gehrki, Richard Fee, Candace Downing, Stewart Dolin, and Woody Witczak, whose widow Kim I met at the 2025 Inner Compass Initiative conference in West Hartford.

As for the documentary’s claims that mass murders have been caused by psychiatric drugs — I think those claims are more speculative. But I know traditional psychiatry and mainstream media (also corrupted by pharmaceutical money) have been overly dismissive of the possibility that psych drugs have contributed to mass violence. For some other credible examples of individual cases of medication-induced psychotic violence, see the cases of David Carmichael, who killed his son while in Paxil-induced psychosis, and Corey Baadsgaard, who held his high school classmates at gunpoint while in Effexor-induced psychosis.

What Do I Think About CCHR and Scientology?

CCHR is controversial because of its affiliation with the Church of Scientology, by which it was co-founded, and because it is largely anti-psychiatry. I first learned about CCHR around 2006, not long after I was released from my torturous stay at the Institute of Living.

I made a decision then — which I still don’t regret — to seek help from CCHR. What I went through was horrific and my eyes had begun to open to how much darkness existed in psychiatry. Although Scientology was controversial and strange, I decided to take a chance and see if they could help me. The director of a small local Connecticut branch met with me and, though she determined no lawsuit could be made in my case, was very professional and kind. Years later, I formally joined CCHR with a small donation. In 2018, I was interviewed for an electroshock documentary by a CCHR filmmaker and by psychologist Linda Lagemann, who appears in the recent documentary, also professional and kind. A few years ago, I did online meetings with a director from the Florida branch, and most recently I was interviewed for the December CCHR article and for the Freedom magazine piece.

I’m not a Scientologist and becoming one doesn’t really interest me. I’m not a fan of religion in general, though I respect religious freedom. As for the allegations of abuse by people working for the Church, I won’t deny them, and I think they should be investigated with legal redress and apologies issued if true. But I don’t see Scientology in black-and-white terms. Just as major abuses committed by people working in the Catholic Church don’t mean everyone in the Church is corrupt, or that the Church is incapable of reform, the same applies here. CCHR’s activism to expose psychiatric abuse is genuinely good, and I’m grateful for it. I don’t know of any other organization doing this work with comparable funding and organization.

Scientology does have aspects that fit the definition of a cult — but the same can be said of most organized religions, and of psychiatry. In fact, I consider psychiatry, with all its dogma and corruption causing widespread iatrogenic harm, to be the most dangerous cult of all. I recognize that psychiatry sometimes helps people, sometimes enormously. But the scale of harm psychiatry has caused and continues to cause is much greater than all the allegations against Scientology, even if all of those allegations are true. And despite having a few celebrity members like Tom Cruise, psychiatry is far better funded, more influential, and more powerful than Scientology. It is the greater danger — and I’m thankful CCHR exists to take it on.

Activism Updates

A few months ago, a campaign website called Stop ECT was released by a coalition of survivors, advocates, and organizations, including CCHR, Global Wellness Forum, Stand for Health Freedom, and World Council for Health. The campaign’s goal is to ban ECT, and it includes a detailed, well-referenced white paper. Personally, I stopped calling for a total ban a while ago — but the material is worth reading for anyone interested in ECT debates. (Note: the buttons inviting people to email U.S. Congress have been removed without explanation, and no contact information is provided for the site’s creators, though the individual coalition organizations can be found easily online.)

On psychiatric medications: there has been a push to pass the Written Informed Consent Act, with versions introduced in both the U.S. House (H.R.4837) and Senate (S.3314). I created a Change.org petition in support. The bills haven’t gained enough traction to pass through congressional committees, but you can view their statuses and find contact info for the bills’ sponsors at MAHA Action (HR 4837 | S 3314). The Senate bill page still has a form to easily message U.S. Senators in support of it. Sponsors of the bills include Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, and Democratic sponsor Rep. Cleo Fields of Louisiana.

If you want to support the bills:

1. Sign the petition.

2. Message your Senator using the form on the MAHA Action website.

Human Rights Complaint to the UN

I don’t expect to ever receive a legal victory or financial compensation for the forced electroshock I endured at Hartford Hospital’s Institute of Living more than 20 years ago — “treatment” that was both psychologically traumatizing and left me more cognitively disabled. But in March, I was moved to make an online submission reporting my human rights violations to the Human Rights Council of the United Nations.

The UN has little direct power over U.S. law or regulations, but it can apply international pressure for legislative and regulatory change. For example, in 2019 and 2022, the UN Committee against Torture concluded that involuntary ECT used on children at New Zealand’s Lake Alice psychiatric facility — combined with failure to investigate or provide redress — constituted violations of the UN Convention against Torture.

I was inspired by one of the Lake Alice survivors, my friend Malcolm Richards, who is still seeking compensation and rehabilitation from the New Zealand government. It’s worth noting that CCHR helped bring about official investigations into the abuse at Lake Alice.

Yet there are clear differences between the Lake Alice cases and mine: ECT was used on children there in clearly abusive ways inconsistent with medical treatment standards, while the doctors who orchestrated my forced ECT (mostly) followed common standards of care — despite how barbaric it still was, and no one should be treated like that. So, I’m not confident the UN will conclude my case constitutes torture under international law, even though it functionally was, by any common definition. Still, I’m encouraged by progressive reports from UN Special Rapporteurs in the last fifteen years, including declarations that mental healthcare has been plagued by outdated practices and human rights violations, and that involuntary medical treatment alone may constitute torture.

I also emailed attorneys connected to Carol Levesque, an elderly patient at Connecticut Valley Hospital who was forced to have ECT approximately 500 times and was mentioned in Marc Fitch’s article, as well as an article by Michael Simonson for Reason magazine. I encouraged those attorneys to consider making a human rights report to the UN on Carol’s behalf.

Closing

Although I continue to struggle personally, it’s remarkable how far activism has come in fighting back against incompetence, corruption, and abuse in psychiatry. I look forward to having a mental healthcare system in the future that is no longer dominated by pharmaceutical and medical device funding, the dogma of biomedical reductionism, and disregard for human rights.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrisjamesdubey.substack.com

A local Connecticut reporter is currently working on a story about forced electroshock (formally called “ECT” or “electroconvulsive therapy” in psychiatry) and is interested in speaking with mental health professionals and people with lived experience of ECT, especially those currently receiving or who have recently received this treatment.

If you would like to be connected with this reporter, please reply to this post or message me privately and I’ll share their contact information with you.

Text by Claude. Voiceover by Atlas at Evernote.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrisjamesdubey.substack.com

Text by Claude. Voiceover by Mia at Evernote.

Over 155,000 veterans have died by suicide since 2001, many after being prescribed medications without proper warnings. Please sign and share this petition supporting HR 4837, which would require written informed consent and could prevent hundreds of veteran deaths each year.

[Postscript note: The petition has been updated to support both HR 4837 (House) and S.3314 (Senate).]

https://www.change.org/p/save-veteran-lives-%EF%B8%8F-support-hr-4837-s-3314-written-informed-consent-act

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrisjamesdubey.substack.com

Voiceover by Sterling at Evernote.

For my final essay for General Psychology I at CT State Community College, I reviewed recent research on health professionals’ perspectives about antidepressant discontinuation. The findings echo my decades-long journey through the mental healthcare system, which both ruined my life and radically transformed it. Essay follows.

Journal Article Review of: “Discontinuing antidepressant medication: a qualitative evidence synthesis and logic model based on health professionals’ views”

Article Summary

In their article, Christoforou and Sutcliffe (2025) examine health professionals’ (HPs) perspectives about factors acting as barriers to or facilitators of antidepressant medication (ADM) deprescribing and discontinuation, finding that societal norms and pressures and systemic healthcare delivery issues appear to influence whether patients receive adequate support to discontinue antidepressants. Additionally, they identify potential policy interventions to address these barriers. This is important because of public health concerns related to antidepressants (Christoforou & Sutcliffe, Background section, pp. 2-3). Deprescribing, the process of reducing or stopping the prescription of medications that may no longer be helpful, is identified as an important step to address these concerns.

Using a form of archival research methodology (Feldman, 2024, pp. 29-30) called a systematic review, Christoforou and Sutcliffe (2025) synthesized data from 14 qualitative studies capturing the views of over 280 HPs. They analyzed findings using Bronfenbrenner’s Social Ecological Model (SEM), which examines environmental contexts affecting social policy issues, and a logic model to illustrate complex concepts and hypotheses (p. 4).

Christoforou and Sutcliffe identify themes in HPs’ viewpoints using the SEM’s societal dimensions, called the microsystem (individual level), mesosystem (interpersonal relationships), exosystem (organizations and institutions,), and macrosystem (cultural or societal customs and patterns). At the microsystem level, they identify themes of HPs’ perceptions of antidepressants and depression, sense of professional duty, and confidence in supporting discontinuation (pp. 6-9). In the mesosystem, HPs’ assessments of patients’ circumstances and characteristics, and assessments of patients’ desires, motivations, and capabilities (pp. 9-10). In the exosystem, systemic healthcare delivery issues (pp. 10-11); in the macrosystem, societal norms and pressures (p. 11).

They describe how these themes in HPs’ perspectives support or hinder deprescribing. The four most common themes they identify are HPs’ fears (especially about harming patients, relationships, and professional liability), limited time and space, insufficient knowledge, and needs for support and collaborative decision-making (pp. 11-12). Some potential policy interventions mentioned or alluded to include improved deprescribing guidelines, training, and tools, greater access to alternative treatments such as psychotherapies, medication reviews and alerts, improved collaboration, and seminars and campaigns to improve HP education (pp. 12, 14-15).

Connection to Course Concepts

Christoforou and Sutcliffe’s review (2025) extends Feldman’s (2024) textbook discussion of major depressive disorder (Ch. 12, Module 38) and drug therapy (Ch. 13, Module 42), by exploring beliefs influencing antidepressant deprescribing.

While ADM is widely used to treat depression (Feldman, Module 42), Christoforou and Sutcliffe describe public health concerns about antidepressants, with social justice implications of potential overdiagnosis and overtreatment (pp. 2-3).

These concerns are offshoots of foundational issues discussed by Feldman (2024), such as differences in the major perspectives in psychology and the key issue of nature vs. nurture (Ch. 1, Module 2; Ch. 12, Module 37). An underlying question is: Is depression caused more by heredity or the environment? Christoforou and Sutcliffe mention debates about the chemical imbalance hypothesis of depression (p. 2). This hypothesis is based in psychology’s neuroscience and medical perspectives, which view behavior through the lens of biology, while behavioral, humanistic, and sociocultural perspectives focus on environmental or social factors (Feldman, 2024, Ch. 1, Module 2; Ch. 12, Module 37). Uncertainties about the etiology of depression, effectiveness of ADM, and risks of long-term antidepressant use support notions that promoting deprescribing is important. I found it intriguing how the opinions of HPs are directly or indirectly influenced by psychology’s major perspectives, reflecting fundamental disagreements about the causes of mental processes and behaviors.

I also gained insights into how the differing perspectives of psychology are influencing conceptions of psychological disorders and how to treat them. How to distinguish normal vs. abnormal behavior, disagreements about psychological diagnosis (Feldman, 2024, Ch. 12, Module 37) and questions about medicalizing reactions to life circumstances and overdiagnosis of depression (Christoforou & Sutcliffe, pp. 2, 11) are not simply abstract debates. Differences in psychological perspectives are having tangible real-world impacts in mental healthcare, like deciding when to use antidepressants and when to discontinue them.

Personal Reflection

Content note: suicide attempts, medical harm

Christoforou and Sutcliffe’s article deeply resonates with my experiences as a mental health patient, as I’ve experienced many of the same beliefs and themes in my treatment.

In 2002, I was an 18-year-old college freshman. A psychiatrist diagnosed me with depression, and I took her suggestion to take the antidepressant paroxetine, a decision I regret immensely. This led to a nightmare of successive adverse effects, including unrecognized severe antidepressant withdrawal syndrome and suicide attempts. Christoforou and Sutcliffe (p. 2) and Feldman (2024, Ch. 13, Module 42, p. 518) briefly mention the increased suicide risk of antidepressants, a fact hardly mentioned when I was 18.

I’m 42 now. Most of my life has involved managing health issues, medication adverse effects, and traumatic or unpleasant medical treatment while living on disability benefits, Medicare, and Medicaid. I’ve encountered many HPs expressing dogmatic neuroscience or biomedical perspectives of mental health, which have contributed to worsened healthcare.

However, in 2015 I started following HPs and researchers with alternative perspectives on social media, gaining many insights. One I follow is British psychiatrist Joanna Moncrieff, who recently spoke at an FDA panel and is lead author of the 2022 umbrella review cited by Christoforou and Sutcliffe (p. 2) concluding that there is no convincing evidence for the serotonin imbalance hypothesis of depression. Moncrieff shared Christoforou and Sutcliffe’s review online—that’s how I found it. I’ve also learned that Study 329, a fraudulent, ghostwritten 2001 study that declared paroxetine to be safe and effective for adolescent depression, is now targeted by a lawsuit to have it retracted.

In 2021 I was fortunate to come across a New Yorker article about Laura Delano, and I pondered if, like her, many of my health issues were actually misinterpreted medication adverse effects and withdrawal effects. I highly recommend her memoir Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance. I began online support groups with her nonprofit organization Inner Compass Initiative (ICI). With difficulty, I found a prescriber willing to help me gradually taper off my last antidepressant, who didn’t express fear or discomfort. My taper took almost four years. After over twenty years believing I needed them for life, I’ve been free from psychiatric drugs for the past year.

On December 3-4, I will attend ICI’s conference in West Hartford. Speakers will include Joanna Moncrieff, Javeed Sukhera, chief psychiatrist at Hartford Hospital, and other influential professionals, researchers, patients, and family members.

I wish none of this happened to me and that I didn’t have this life full of illness and pain. It still feels surreal, and I’m figuring out what comes next. But I’m glad for the community I’ve found, and I look forward to going.

References

Christoforou, L., & Sutcliffe, K. (2025). Discontinuing antidepressant medication: a qualitative evidence synthesis and logic model based on health professionals’ views. BMC Health Services Research, 25(1), 1226. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-025-13445-7

Feldman, R. S. (2024). Essentials of Understanding Psychology (2024 Release, 15th ed). McGraw Hill LLC. e-book.

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Written with Grok (xAI). Voiceover by Atlas at Evernote.

Today I reached out by email to actress/singer Selena Gomez‘s mental health charity, the Rare Impact Fund. I shared my personal experiences with psychiatric treatment and advocated for greater awareness of under-discussed risks in mental healthcare, such as overmedicalization, overdiagnosis, overprescribing, and adverse effects. Drawing from my involvement with the Antidepressant Coalition for Education (ACE) and Inner Compass Initiative (ICI), the below email highlights critical issues affecting millions, especially youth. I invited the fund to explore these topics and consider collaborations to promote safer, more informed mental health support.

The Email

Subject: Invitation to Explore Critical Issues in Mental Health Treatment

Dear Rare Impact Fund,

Thank you for your important work supporting youth mental health through the Rare Impact Fund. Selena Gomez’s dedication to reducing stigma and increasing access to mental health resources is making a real difference for young people. Although “late to the show,” I’ve recently been enjoying watching Season 1 of 13 Reasons Why on Netflix.

I’m writing as someone with lived experience of psychiatric treatment and as a member of both the Antidepressant Coalition for Education (ACE) and Inner Compass Initiative (ICI). I became involved in mental healthcare reform advocacy several years ago because of my very difficult experiences with mental health issues and mental healthcare.

While I appreciate the progress being made in mental health awareness, I believe it’s crucial to also address some critical but under-discussed aspects of psychiatric care: the risks of overmedicalization, overdiagnosis, overprescribing, and adverse effects from psychiatric treatments. These issues significantly impact individuals, particularly young people, and deserve greater attention to ensure safer and more informed care.

I invite you to review this thread on X from the Antidepressant Coalition for Education (ACE), which highlights important concerns regarding antidepressant withdrawal risks, the need for better FDA warnings, evidence-based tapering guidelines, and recognition of conditions like akathisia. The thread is grounded in established science and supported by experts, and it addresses a hidden public health crisis affecting millions:

https://x.com/ACE_CoalitionEd/status/1988623971529695340

More context is available here:

For more comprehensive information about these issues, I encourage you to contact:

Antidepressant Coalition for Education (ACE)

Website:

https://antidepressantinfo.org/

Contact: https://antidepressantinfo.org/contact/

Inner Compass Initiative

Website:

https://www.theinnercompass.org

Contact: [email protected]

Inner Compass Initiative, founded by author Laura Delano (author of Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance), provides critical education and support for people reconsidering psychiatric diagnoses and medications. They’re hosting an important conference near Hartford, Connecticut in December on “The Future of Mental Health in America” bringing together patients, clinicians, researchers, and policymakers.

I believe that incorporating awareness of psychiatric treatment harms could strengthen the Rare Impact Fund’s mission to support comprehensive, safe, and truly informed mental healthcare for young people.

Thank you for your consideration and your vital contributions to mental health advocacy.

Best regards,

Chris Dubey

Connecticut

https://www.madinamerica.com/author/cdubey/

https://linktr.ee/chrisjamesdubey

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Text written with Claude. Video made with invideo AI.

Something exciting is happening in the sphere of policymaking to reduce iatrogenic harm in mental healthcare. Inner Compass Initiative is hosting their inaugural conference and gala on December 3-4 in West Hartford, Connecticut.

What Is This Event?

“The Future of Mental Health in America“ brings together an incredible range of voices—current and former patients, clinicians, researchers, policymakers, journalists, academics, family members, and advocates—to take a hard look at today’s mental health industry and reimagine how we understand ourselves and the challenges that come with being human.

About Laura Delano and Inner Compass Initiative

For those unfamiliar, Inner Compass Initiative was founded by Laura Delano, a writer, speaker, and advocate whose work has been transformative for so many people reconsidering their relationship with psychiatric diagnosis and treatment.

Laura’s recently published memoir, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance, tells her powerful journey through and beyond the mental health industry. She’s been interviewed by major outlets including CNN and the New York Times, and collaborates with clinicians and researchers advocating for reducing overdiagnosis and overprescribing—including professionals who recently served on an FDA panel.

Recommended Reading

If you’re planning to attend this conference, I strongly recommend reading Unshrunk beforehand. It provides essential context for understanding the conversations that will be happening and the perspective ICI brings to mental health reform. Copies (including audio versions) of the book may be available from local libraries or by request.

The Lineup

The speaker list includes some really compelling voices in this space:

* Laura Delano - Founder, Inner Compass Initiative

* Cooper Davis - Executive Director, ICI

* David Cohen, PhD - Professor of Social Welfare at UCLA, co-author of Mad Science

* Dr. Roger McFillin - Clinical Psychologist and host of the Radically Genuine Podcast

* Mollie Adler - Creator and host of Back From The Borderline podcast

* Jeffrey Lacasse, PhD - Associate Professor at Florida State University, researcher on psychiatric medication knowledge dissemination

* Lauren Kennedy West - Advocate and YouTube creator documenting her experiences with psychosis and metabolic therapies for mental health

The diversity of perspectives—from academics and clinicians to people with lived experience—promises some genuinely important conversations about where mental healthcare is heading and what real reform might look like.

Event Details

When: December 3-4, 2025

* Wednesday evening: Reception (5-7pm)

* Thursday: Full conference (8:30am-5pm) plus cocktails and gala dinner

Where: The Delamar, West Hartford, Connecticut

Tickets: Early bird pricing is $395 (through October 31)

More information and registration: theinnercompass.org/conference

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Join the ISPS-US 2025 Conference from November 8-9, exploring psychological and social approaches to psychosis. Hybrid event in Chicago and online via Zoom.

Info and registration: https://ispsus2025.sched.com/

Blog post:

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Image: The 2025 conference banner, courtesy of ISPS-US.

Written with Claude (Anthropic). Voiceover by Xavier at Evernote.

This November, I’ll be virtually attending the ISPS-US 2025 Annual Conference , and it will be my first time at this conference. The conference runs November 8-9, 2025, with a pre-conference workshop on November 7th.

About ISPS

The International Society for Psychological and Social Approaches to Psychosis (ISPS) is a membership organization that promotes psychological and social approaches to states of mind often called “psychosis.” ISPS-US stands for the United States chapter.

Founded as part of an international human rights movement in 1956, ISPS brings together diverse perspectives—including service providers, people with lived experience, family members, activists, and researchers—to reimagine mental health care. The organization provides education, training, advocacy, and opportunities for dialogue, working toward a future of transformative, humane mental health treatment that values connection and understanding over purely biomedical approaches.

About the Conference

The conference will be held at the University of Illinois Chicago, but thankfully they’re offering a hybrid format with full online access via Zoom. This means those of us who can’t make it to Chicago in person can still participate in many of the sessions and discussions.

This year’s theme is “Bridging the Divides: From Fragmentation to Connection in Psychosis and Society.” The conference is an opportunity to explore how to bridge the widening divides in psychosis care—between clinical ideologies, the realities of those experiencing symptoms and those providing care, and what we aspire to versus what currently exists in mental health systems. Through dialogue, collaboration, and advocacy, participants will work to address the fragmentations—psychical, racial, economic, gender-based, and cultural—that reverberate through psyche, family, and society.

What Makes ISPS Different

ISPS has a special commitment to psychological and social approaches rather than purely biomedical models. They create space for dialogue across different disciplines and perspectives, emphasizing connection over fragmentation—which is exactly what their 2025 theme addresses.

The organization promotes education, training, and advocacy while centering the voices of people with lived experience. It’s a community that recognizes psychosis as a human experience worthy of understanding, not just symptoms to be suppressed.

Looking Forward

I’m looking forward to the presentations, workshops, and conversations that will emerge from this gathering.

If you’re interested in attending (either in-person or virtually), you can find more details and register through the conference website.

Have you attended an ISPS conference before? What topics related to psychosis and mental health support are you most interested in?

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrisjamesdubey.substack.com

Introduction and ending note written with Claude (Anthropic). Voiceover by Aurora at Evernote.

Introduction

For Week 5 of my General Psychology I course at CT State Community College, we studied learning theories (Chapter 5) and memory (Chapter 6). The discussion assignment offered three options, and I chose to analyze a personal fear through the lens of psychological theory.

This assignment gave me an opportunity to apply what I’ve been learning about classical conditioning and memory processes to my own experiences with medical trauma. Years ago, during a hospitalization, I went through what’s called a prescribing cascade—where adverse effects of medications were misinterpreted and treated with additional medications, creating a cycle of harm. The healthcare providers involved showed little understanding of patient-centered care or how to recognize medication side effects, and my reports about what was happening to me went largely unheard.

That experience left me with lasting fear and anxiety around medical settings. While I’ve spent years understanding this trauma from advocacy and policy perspectives, this assignment challenged me to examine it through formal psychological frameworks—specifically, how classical conditioning created the fear and how memory mechanisms maintain it.

Below is my response to the Week 5 discussion questions. It demonstrates how psychology can help us understand even our most difficult experiences. Whether you’re interested in psychology, have experienced medical trauma yourself, or are curious about how our brains create and preserve fear responses, I hope this provides some insight into the science behind lived experience.

My Response to Initial Post, Question Set Three

(1) Describe in detail about a situation or an object you fear (20 point).

I am afraid of hospitals, medical settings, and interactions with healthcare professionals. It is because of some traumatic experiences many years ago during a hospitalization in which severe adverse effects of medication were misinterpreted as being due to underlying mental health conditions, a clinical bias called diagnostic overshadowing (Nash, 2013). I went through something called a prescribing cascade, a series of events where adverse effects of a medical treatment are misinterpreted and treated with additional treatments that cause more side effects, and so on (Rochon & Gurwitz, 1997), which my doctors probably had little training about. They also probably lacked training in patient-centered care (NEJM Catalyst, 2017), as my feelings and wishes were not respected. Because of the medical trauma (Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, 2023), I often feel some anxiety when going to medical appointments. Sometimes the anxiety causes high blood pressure at appointments.

(2) Choose a learning theory discussed in Chapter 5 (modules 15 - 17), summarize the theory (10 points), and use the theory to explain in depth the causes of the fear (20 points).

Classical conditioning is a type of learning in which a neutral stimulus causes a particular response after being paired with another stimulus that naturally brings about that response (Feldman, 2024, pp. 173-180), and it partly explains the fear. The neutral stimulus is something that doesn’t naturally cause that response, but will cause the response after classical conditioning. Research on this type of learning was pioneered by Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, who found that after pairing the ringing of a bell with the presentation of tasty meat to dogs, the dogs would begin to salivate in response to the bell ringing, even when the meat was no longer shown to them. In that research, the meat was an unconditioned stimulus (one that naturally causes a particular response without being learned) and the dogs’ salivation was an unconditioned response (a natural response that occurs without training). The bell was a neutral stimulus that, after learning, became a conditioned stimulus, bringing about the conditioned response of salivation after pairing with the meat. As Feldman describes (2024, pp. 176-177), classical conditioning explains why some people develop a fear of going to dentists after experiencing painful dental procedures.

Classical conditioning partly explains my fear of medical settings after my experience of trauma in the hospital. Although healthcare appointments are usually benign or helpful (neutral stimuli), during my hospitalization I experienced physical and emotional pain, unconditioned responses to adverse effects of cascading medical treatments, which the nurses and doctors mostly ignored. Thus, nurses, doctors, and clinics became conditioned stimuli that still cause my conditioned responses of fear, hypervigilance, and increased blood pressure.

A learning process related to classical conditioning is stimulus generalization, in which after an original stimulus becomes conditioned to produce a response, similar stimuli produce the same response. This also explains why I feel some fear in other types of healthcare settings, even a bit for outpatient dental and vision appointments.

(3) Use memory theories in Chapter 6 (modules 18 and 19), discuss and explain the role memory plays in your fear (20 Points).

Memory, the process of storing and retrieving information in our minds (Feldman, 2024, p. 207-218), was central to the creation of my fear and allows its preservation. In my brain’s limbic system, my hippocampus consolidated and stabilized my memories of the trauma and sent them to my cerebral cortex for permanent storage as long-term memory, while my amygdala, involved with emotion, is reactivated when I’m in medical settings that have any similarity.

Theories of long-term memory (Feldman, 2024, p. 219-230) explain the persistence of my fear. Because the experience was emotionally significant, it became a flashbulb memory, one that is recalled easily and vividly (Feldman, 2024, pp. 222-223). Many years later, I still recall interactions with hospital staff with a distinct emotional impact. Levels-of-processing theory emphasizes that the amount of processing of information determines how much of it is remembered (Feldman, 2024, p. 220). Because I ruminated and journaled about my experiences while in the hospital, the memories became easy to recall. I have spent much time considering the significance of the events in the hospital, how they relate to other parts of my life, and problems with healthcare in general. Constructive processes like this, in which memories are influenced by the meaning we assign to events (Feldman, 2024, p. 224), have further affected how I recall the events in the hospital.

References

Feldman, R. S. (2024). Essentials of Understanding Psychology (2024 Release, 15th ed). McGraw Hill LLC. pp. 171-239. Print.

Nash, M. (2013). Diagnostic overshadowing: A potential barrier to physical health care for mental health service users. Mental Health Practice, 17(4), 22–26. https://doi.org/10.7748/mhp2013.12.17.4.22.e862

NEJM Catalyst. (2017). What Is Patient-Centered Care? NEJM Catalyst, 3(1). https://catalyst.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/CAT.17.0559

Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine. (2023, June 7). Medical Trauma: Dealing with Psychological Responses to Medical Events. PCOM. https://www.pcom.edu/academics/programs-and-degrees/mental-health-counseling/news/what-is-medical-trauma.html

Rochon, P. A., & Gurwitz, J. H. (1997). Optimising drug treatment for elderly people: The prescribing cascade. BMJ, 315(7115), 1096–1099. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.315.7115.1096

What are your thoughts on applying psychological theory to understand medical trauma or other personal trauma? I welcome your comments below.

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