2+ years in the making, and I can’t believe it’s finally happening. Grateful to @StMartinsPress for giving me the space to share my views.

Friends: my publisher is giving away 50 advance copies of The Madness Pill. If you’d like to read it months before release, go to its Goodreads page (link below) and click ‘enter giveaway’. Thanks for your interest!

Psychiatry does incalculable damage convincing people their depression is a disorder, rather than the mind’s well-designed signal that something’s wrong with your life. It’s not just the harms of drugs. It’s also the squandered opportunities for self-discovery and growth.

The most dehumanizing part of being a psychiatric patient is that everything you say and do is seen as a “symptom” of your “disorder”. My doctor added two weeks to my stay in an adolescent psych ward because I’d taken an unauthorized smoke break - proof I was still unwell.

Psychiatry is the enemy of self-knowledge. Any attempt to understand the roots of my suffering - rather than settle for “symptom management” - must be mocked, belittled, dismissed as pseudoscience. Their inability to heal is now worn as a badge of pride.

The anti-psychiatrists of the 60s saw that being a ‘mentally ill patient’ is, in one respect, a social role - like ‘businessman’, ‘wife’, ‘teacher’. Like any role, it can be imposed, resisted, or embraced. Their task was to trace how the role could become an obstacle to healing.

I’m rereading the anti-psychiatrists of the 60s. It’s astonishing how their radical edge was buried. Their target wasn’t just meds or consent, but the illusion that mental health problems are medical problems, problems for doctors to treat. That kind of critique deserves revival.

Research shows that the message “your mental health problems are symptoms of brain disorders” actively harms patients. It strips away agency and hope. So, do psychiatrists not know this? Do they think the benefits outweigh the harms? Or do they know, but feel they have no choice?

despite studies suggesting they offer care comparable or superior to the status quo. I’m writing a longer essay now, but visiting Inner Fire solidified my conviction: alternatives to hospitals and drugs do exist. We need to be aware of them and invest in them (3/3)

and engaging in various forms of therapy, in a serene environment and a safe, supportive community. On arriving, you have no idea who the clients are and who the counselors are. Similar homes exist in Vermont, like Soteria, but they struggle with funding and legitimacy…(2/3)

Two weeks ago, I visited a therapeutic community in Vermont called Inner Fire. It’s a refuge for people with serious mental illness, an alternative to hospitalization and psychiatric drugs. People spend their days gardening, eating nourishing food…(1/3)

In the 80s, psychiatrists sought to give patients tools to manage their thoughts and emotions so they could live full, independent lives. Today, they cultivate dependence on drugs, making patients even more helpless, passive, and fragile.

There’s something very evil about convincing people that their problems in life - feeling sad or purposeless or failing to fit in - are symptoms of disorders to be managed by drugs. That belief destroys our capacity for meaningful action.

It’s actually funny how we constantly bombard our brains with alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, shitty food, bad sleep, zero movement - and then get anxious and depressed and think “maybe I should be on meds.”

The biggest lie psychiatry tells is that mental health is complex and requires elite expertise. In reality, every human instinctively knows its elements: clean air and food, movement, sleep, meaningful work, and a community that accepts you and embraces your eccentricity.

With rare exceptions, psychiatry makes you worse. Instead of seeing your problems as a coherent response to crisis and helping you through it, they claim you have a chronic brain condition that needs drugs. That identity and habit will fuck you up more than the original problem.

It’s hard for many to imagine what psychiatry was like before social media. They destroyed lives with no accountability, no way for harmed patients to find each other or share advice. Unthinkable levels of gaslighting.

Every mental health problem I’ve ever had - depression, anxiety, insomnia - only improved when I treated it as a part of myself urgently trying to tell me something. Psychiatry so often fails because it rests on a flat, impoverished conception of the self.

Philosopher of science here. This might be the clearest statement ever made on how psychiatry distinguishes science and pseudoscience. God bless this man.

Psychiatrists have abused the public trust for decades. Now we’re witnessing the complete collapse of collective faith in their authority. This is directly on them.

For @PsychToday, I talked with journalist Daniel Bergner, whose book, The Mind and the Moon, follows the lives of people who recovered from schizophrenia without drugs