"When Insanity is a Blessing: The Message of Shamanism," chapter from Holger Kalweit's Shamans, Healers, and Medicine Men.

http://www.theicarusproject.net/files/KalweitInsanityBlessing.PDF

By Aubrey Ellen Shomo

I see it everywhere: People with mental illness need medication.  It sounds reasonable.

Today, there are even political organizations that seek to make it easy to force a person to take it.

It's easy to look at another and assume things like that.  It's human.  After all, it's compassionate to help someone who isn't able to ask for help, right?  They'll thank you in the long run, won't they?

"These stories – honest, gut-wrenching and triumphant – are told by people who, through darkness, have found wellness and healing, meaning and purpose. They teach us about finding love in a world that is often harsh and cruel. With courage and insight, they reveal how to reclaim mental health in a culture that often misunderstands the healing process. Our stories demonstrate the power of the human spirit to prevail"

"The Politics of Rationality: Psychiatric Survivors' Challenge to Psychiatry," Gabriella Coleman's chapter in the Tactical Biopolitics: Art, Activism, and Technoscience book, examines the history of psychiatric survivor movement to assess its radical political position in the face of changing conditions, notably the growing legitimacy of a neurochemical model of illness and a pervasive culture of seeking, prescribing, and taking drugs.

Paula Caplan: 'If you wanted to make someone feel helpless, hopeless, even crazy, one good way to do it would be this: ...give them a pill that may calm them down or pep them up but will have a good chance of increasing their weight. This has been the fate of women in untold numbers but certainly in the millions, and women’s position in American society makes them more likely than men to feel ashamed for their part in what is being called this country’s obesity epidemic."

Alex Samets wrote this strategy and vision essay as part of the In The Middle Of A Whirlwind journal:

TIP works to bring a discussion of mental health into community spaces and to make narratives of internal struggle part of narratives of collective struggle. As an organization, we are mindfully creating our own narratives, authoring the documents that build our histories, and crafting future realities from our desires.

South African graduate psychology student Niyati Evers research paper on shamanism and schizophrenia, including an interview with a Botswana sangoma - spirit healer - and discussion of process-oriented psychology.