This week on the MIA podcast we are providing the audio taken from our recent psychiatric drug withdrawal town hall held in May 2021.

For our third discussion, we are examining protracted problems that can arise after psychiatric drug withdrawal. Sometimes referred to as post-acute or post-withdrawal syndromes, these experiences can include chronic health problems and sexual dysfunction. What do we know and not know about responding to long- term health problems after coming off psychiatric drugs?

For references and slides mentioned in the discussion, visit this link: https://www.madinamerica.com/pdwref/

Panelists

Adele Framer

Adele Framer resides in San Francisco, USA. A survivor of 11 years of antidepressant withdrawal syndrome, in 2011, under the pseudonym Altostrata, she founded the peer support site SurvivingAntidepressants.org, currently containing more than 6,000 longitudinal case histories from its 14,000 members. A widely recognized patient advocate, she is a lay expert in psychiatric drug tapering and withdrawal syndromes.

Will Hall

Will Hall is a schizophrenia diagnosis survivor and longtime organizer with the psychiatric survivor movement. He is a PhD candidate at Maastricht University and lead researcher on the Maastricht World Survey on Antipsychotic Drug Withdrawal, and author of the Harm Reduction Guide to Coming Off Psychiatric Drugs, as well as host of Madness Radio and a co-founder of the Hearing Voices Network USA.

David Healy

David Healy is a Professor of Psychiatry in the Department of Family Medicine at McMaster University in Hamilton Canada. He has been raising concerns about withdrawal from antidepressants since the mid-1990s and was an expert witness in a successful legal case about withdrawal and dependence in 2004. He figures we have made little or no progress sorting the issues out and now have a major public health crisis on our hands.

Nicole Lamberson

Nicole Lamberson is a physician assistant as well as a patient suffering protracted harm following a rapid medical “detox” from prescribed benzodiazepines/Z-drugs & other psychotropic polypharmacy. She co- founded The Withdrawal Project, serves on the Medical Board of Benzodiazepine Information Coalition, & does outreach for Medicating Normal-The Film.

Hanna Pickard is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University. She is also appointed with the William H. Miller Department of Philosophy, the Berman Institute of Bioethics, and the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.

Her expertise is deep and spread across a wide variety of disciplines. As an analytic philosopher, she specializes in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychiatry, moral psychology, and clinical ethics. She also worked for a decade at The Oxfordshire Complex Needs Service, a specialist service in the NHS for people diagnosed with personality disorders and complex needs. Her work tends to address the sticky debates that arise in clinical practice.

She has over 35 academic publications and has co-edited The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Science of Addiction. Pickard maintains an important thread between clinical work in the real world and her philosophical writings, attending to topics like the nature of mental disorders, delusions, agency, character, emotions, self-harm, violence, placebos, therapeutic relationships, decision-making capacity, the self and social identity, and attitudes towards mental disorder and crime.

In this interview, she discusses her novel and possibly controversial model for understanding addiction, the numerous shortcomings of the neurobiological model, the importance of centering patient agency, and her work in therapeutic communities.

Katrina Michelle is a psychologist and the founder and director of The Curious Spirit, a transpersonally oriented psychotherapeutic practice that encourages transcendent personal exploration to remedy psychological suffering. She is a holistic psychotherapist currently serving as faculty at Columbia University School of Social Work and The Institute for the Development of Human Arts.

In addition to her practice, she also serves as the director of harm reduction for the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) and formerly worked as the executive director of the American Center for the Integration of Spiritually Transformative Experiences (ACISTE). To demystify awakening experiences through storytelling and art, she is also producing the film When Lightning Strikes.

Beginning in the world of traditional social work, Michelle was drawn to transpersonal psychology after her own spontaneous spiritually transformative experience. She now works to help create communities capable of holding these often difficult experiences, as western societies often lack the language and cultural understanding needed to integrate them into daily life.

In this interview, we discuss the place of psychedelics in psychotherapy, how spiritually transformative experiences can be mistaken for ‘mental illness,’ and the various resistances we have to these experiences.

Hannah Zeavin is a leading scholar investigating how mediated communications and technology impact our intimate relations. Her most recent work tackles teletherapy and digital mental health communications, which have seen a boon throughout the pandemic.

Zeavin is a Lecturer in the Departments of English and History at the University of California, Berkeley, and affiliated with the Berkeley Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society. Zeavin is also a visiting fellow at the Columbia University Center for the Study of Social Difference. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU in 2018.

Her first book, The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy, will be published by MIT Press this summer. Zeavin serves as an editorial associate and author for numerous publications, including the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. She is also a co-founder of The Science, Technology, and Society Futures Initiative.

In this interview, she discusses her upcoming books and all things mediated communication, teletherapy, and technology. Zeavin approaches human relationality, including therapy, from the perspectives of literature and media studies. She explores the history of psychoanalysis and other forms of therapy, garnering fresh insights into our relationship with technology and each other–without the usual moral tenor of psychologists.

She also draws upon her research to discuss how care may take unexpected forms through technologies, enabling distanced intimacy and social change that transcends the psychology of the individual. We close by addressing the feminization of care labor, care as a cover for capture and control, and shifts in how we understand care, now and in the future.

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Our next psychiatric drug withdrawal town hall discussion will be held on May 14 2021, register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/150023595613

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This week on the MIA podcast we are providing the audio taken from our recent psychiatric drug withdrawal town hall held in March 2021.

This discussion was aired live on March 12, 2021 and the panelists are Dr Giovanni Fava, Dr Peter Groot, Dr Mark Horowitz and Professor Joanna Moncrieff.

For this discussion, we asked what science and research can tell us about the experience of withdrawal. We discuss research effort that has called into question long-held professional beliefs about the effects of psychotropic drugs on the brain and nervous system.

Panelists

Giovanni Fava

Dr Giovanni Fava is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He has authored more than 500 scientific papers and performed groundbreaking research in several fields. He is editor-in-chief of the journal Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics.

Peter Groot

Dr Peter Groot is a researcher who started using antidepressants. His own experiences helped him to develop a practical solution proposed by many patients to help prevent withdrawal problems from antidepressants and other psychotropic drugs.

Mark Horowitz

Dr Mark Horowitz is a training psychiatrist and psychiatric academic at University College London who is currently coming off psychiatric drugs. His work and research focuses on how to safely stop psychiatric medication.

Joanna Moncrieff

Dr Joanna Moncrieff is a psychiatrist based in community mental health services in North East London. She also teaches and researches at University College London. Joanna is one of the founding members and the co-chairperson of the Critical Psychiatry Network.

This episode of “Mad in the Family” discusses the links between nutrition and mental health, and the science that’s showing that diet may help improve or even prevent mental health issues in children and adults.

Julie Rucklidge: "Taking a one-a-day gummy bear might prevent you from getting scurvy, but it's not meeting the optimal amount that your brain needs.”

Julia's interest in nutrition and mental health grew out of her own research showing poor outcomes for children with psychiatric illness despite conventional treatments. In the last decade, the Mental Health and Nutrition Research Group has been running clinical trials investigating the role of broad-spectrum micronutrients in the expression of issues such as ADHD, mood disorders, anxiety, and stress associated with traumatic events, such as earthquakes and mass shootings.

Julia's interest in nutrition and mental health grew out of her own research showing poor outcomes for children with psychiatric illness despite conventional treatments. In the last decade, the Mental Health and Nutrition Research Group has been running clinical trials investigating the role of broad-spectrum micronutrients in the expression of issues such as ADHD, mood disorders, anxiety, and stress associated with traumatic events, such as earthquakes and mass shootings.

With her colleague Bonnie Kaplan, Ph.D., she is the author of a new book, The Better Brain: Overcome Anxiety, Combat Depression, and Reduce ADHD and Stress with Nutrition, which will be published April 20 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Anne Guy is a member of the council for evidence-based psychiatry (CEP) and works with the secretariat for the All-party Parliamentary Group for Prescribed Drug Dependence. She's the lead editor and author of “Guidance for psychological therapists: enabling conversations with clients taking or withdrawing from prescribed psychiatric drugs.” (an abridged version can be found here). This guide is endorsed by the British Association for Counseling and Psychotherapy, the UK Council for Psychotherapy, the National Counseling Society, and the British Psychological Society. Dr. Guy is also a practicing psychotherapist that does not rely on a model of diagnosis to help her clients.

Beginning as a claims manager for an insurance company, she got an up-close view of how the healthcare system worked and saw the biggest problems clearly. This “systems view” followed her into her work as a psychotherapist, where she attempts to navigate systemic failures that have resulted in the over-prescription of psychiatric drugs.

In this interview, we will discuss withdrawal from psychiatric medications, problems with psychiatry's over-reliance on the biomedical model, the difference between “addiction” and “dependence,” and counseling beyond diagnosis. She notes that while withdrawal can be difficult, not everyone will experience it as severely as described—for example, research shows that 50% of people coming off antidepressants are likely to experience some kind of withdrawal reactions, with half of those describing them as ‘severe.’ Most reactions last weeks or months with a small group of people experiencing them for years.

Peter Sterling, now retired from the University of Pennsylvania, is a well-known neuroscientist, having co-authored a popular text, Principles of Neural Design. He is a lifelong political activist, and historians of psychiatry may remember his public criticisms of psychiatric treatments in the 1970s, most notably of electroshock and antipsychotics.

He could also be described as an ethnographer, as his travels among the indigenous people of Panama, where he now lives part-time, influenced his understanding of how the human brain was shaped in response to the demands of early hunter-gatherer societies.

He is the author of a recent book titled, What is Health: Allostasis and the Evolution of Human Design. His books raises this provocative question: What does our species require for a healthy life? And can we achieve this with drugs?

Bethany Morris is an assistant professor of psychology at Point Park University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she teaches and does theoretical and qualitative research. Dr. Morris is a transdisciplinary scholar whose work bridges critical psychology, literature, philosophy, history, psychoanalysis, and film studies.

Early in her career, at Prince Edward Island University and Brock University in Canada, she studied alternative anti-psychiatric interventions for early-onset schizophrenia as illuminated by children’s literature. During this time, she was also thinking critically about issues of women’s stigmatization and oppression.

In recent years, her work has focused on using the ideas of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to gain a further critical understanding of the oppression of women, psychology’s medical model, and other issues related to social justice.

Her recent publications include the co-authored book Subjectivity in Psychology in the Era of Social Justice, as well as her first solo-authored book, Sexual Difference, Abjection, and Liminal Spaces. Throughout her work is a sustained critique of Borderline Personality Disorder, both as a diagnostic category and the way that it is used toward misogynistic ends in popular culture.

This week on the MIA podcast, we discuss a recent paper that considers the support provided by online support groups when people seek help for psychiatric drug withdrawal. The paper is entitled ‘The role of Facebook groups in the management and raising of awareness of antidepressant withdrawal: is social media filling the void left by health services?’ It was published in the journal Therapeutic Advances in Psychopharmacology in January 2021 and the authors are Sherry Julo, Ed White and John Read.

The role of Facebook groups in the management and raising of awareness of antidepressant withdrawal: is social media filling the void left by health services?

Facebook Groups Provide Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal Help When Doctors Don’t

Out of the Abyss (with a Little Help from My Friends)

Antidepressant Withdrawal: Avoid Doctors?

Tens of Thousands Relying on Social Media Support Groups to Withdraw From Antidepressants (video)