IIPDW Network Meeting Brings Together Professional and Lived-Experience Expertise
Withdrawal from psychiatric drugs is an issue which is rapidly gaining attention in many parts of the world, yet professional medical circles can sometimes be remote from the discussion. The International Institute for Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal (IIPDW) was created in 2017 to respond to the need to widen the debate and to develop ways to assist people withdrawing safely from psychiatric drugs.
The Power Threat Meaning Framework – A critique of a critique
The Power Threat Meaning Framework (PTMF), a conceptual alternative to the diagnostic model of distress co-produced by psychologists and survivors, has attracted an extraordinary...
Gaslighting: Should we Label the Victims as Psychotic or Abused?
It took me a long time to realise that I was being gaslighted. In fact, I had no word to describe the experience until years after I had finally escaped, when I came across the term by chance. What is worse, whenever I talk about my past relationship now with friends in my new life, I am horrified to discover how common manipulative relationships are.
Challenging a Diagnosis
Psychiatric diagnoses have far-reaching consequences for every area of your life: welfare, employment, health and travel insurance, physical and mental health assessment/treatment, adoption rights, and social stigma, to name but a few. Yet they are just subjective opinions with no scientific basis and can change over time.
The Politics of Distress: A discussion with Dr. James Davies on his new book...
Our system fails because it colludes with social structures that themselves generate harmful ways of being in the world. The sector at best sedates these states while at the same time exonerates harmful social arrangements by over-emphasising the so-called internal and disordered causes of structural distress.