Tanya Luhrmann is a Watkins University Professor in the Anthropology Department at Stanford. Her work explores how cultural contexts shape the experience of mental distress, particularly voice-hearing and the symptoms associated with psychosis. She also turns the lens on the practice of Western psychiatry itself, investigating how the field represents the mind and how these representations influence our collective understanding of reality.

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Recently there have been spirited discussions among consumers about what we want to propose as a basic change in the mental health system. Several of us have proposed that legislation be passed to ensure that every state and every community have reliable funding for consumer-run support and advocacy groups similar to the independent living centers for people with other disabilities. I liked the idea, but then I started to worry that those centers would be marginalized or co-opted as long as the mental health system remains narrowly medical. I have concluded, and have preliminary support from other leaders, that as consumers, we need to redesign the whole system and society from the bottom up, based on our lived experiences with mental health issues. I believe that only by having a vision of a truly recovery-transformed system and society, will we ever see lasting and genuine change.

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Article discussing important information about Covid-19 and things to keep aware of. A lot of useful info is included.

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Last September, I believed my brain was on fire. Not in some metaphorical way. It was, as far as I was concerned, on fire.
I am bipolar and I was hallucinating. My hallucinations can be sensory, like the brain burn, but many are auditory — I know hallucinations are coming when I hear birds speak. I can tell you what the birds say, but what matters is how intensely personal it is, being shouted at by a fierce small crowd: persist persist persist from one, six degrees yes yes yes from another.

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The Hearing Voices movement began in Europe in the late 1980s when Marius Romme, a psychiatrist, realized that his training and therapeutic techniques were not helping one of his patients to manage the voices in her head. In listening to Patsy Hage, Romme began to wonder if maybe other voice-hearers might be in a better position to help her than he was. His hunch turned out to be correct, and the Hearing Voices Network (HVN) was co-founded by Romme and Hage in 1987.

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Created by US Department of Health and Human Services
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration
Center for Mental Health Services
http://www.samhsa.gov/
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The Hurdalsjøen Recovery Center, which is a private psychiatric hospital located about forty minutes north of Oslo, on the banks of stunning Lake Hurdal, was set up by its director, Ole Andreas Underland, to provide “medication-free” care for those who wanted such treatment or who wanted to taper from their psychiatric drugs. Norway’s health minister was urging public mental hospitals to offer such treatment, and this private hospital stepped forward before any public hospital had taken the plunge.

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Anthropologists who study the psychiatric field recently had papers published in two highly influential journals. The New England Journal of Medicine featured a commentary by Gardner and Kleinman, “Medicine and the Mind — The Consequences of Psychiatry’s Identity Crisis” while “Merging Intensive Peer Support and Dialogic Practice: Implementation Lessons From Parachute NYC” by Hopper and colleagues was in Psychiatric Services. Arthur Kleinman and Kim Hopper are leaders in their field. For this reason alone, these papers are worthy of review. While they both call for or describe reform initiatives, they point us in different directions with regard to the future role of psychiatrists.

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