UPDATE ON the Mental Health Humor: Cartoon-a-thon

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: UPDATE ON the Mental Health Humor: Cartoon-a-thon
To: Andy Alt
Date: Wed, 27 May 2009 12:50:36 -0400
From: Chato B. Stewart
Organization: Mental Health humor

Dear Peer, Provider or Caregiver,

Wow, what a great Mental Health Awareness month! This year so many
people are really putting in a lot of effort from the DBSA, NAMI and
many other organizations like Mental Health America and also not to for
get many of our peers and their individual efforts.

The Mental Health Humor Cartoon-A-Thon is a free and fun project to use
humor as a coping skill. Each day during the month I’ve volunteered to
draw one cartoon. Now we have 26 new cartoons for this month to use
humor to bring awareness to many different mental health issues. It’s
meant to use positive humor as a way to cope with our serious disorders.

Life and Death are Forever Nothing

Life and Death are Forever Nothing
By Andy Alt / Mental Dimensions

May 24, 2009

Death decaying in the smoldering, burning pit
Vile demons flying around a black, dusty corpse

Flesh ripped off by slimy filth-ridden vultures
Eternal torment a hair’s-breadth away

TIME: Why Antidepressants Don’t Live Up to the Hype

Philip Dawdy at Furious Seasons pointed out an article on TIME magazine’s web site and provided commentary.

I won’t be commenting on it, just providing publicity. Although the staff at TIME has expressly forbidden me to promote their magazine or be their spokesperson, they didn’t say anything about promoting their articles.

Alison Bass: Brown psychiatry chief Martin Keller to step down in June…

The latest from the blog of Alison Bass:

Alison Bass: Brown psychiatry chief Martin Keller to step down in June…

[...]
While Brown officials insist that the decision to step down was Keller’s, my understanding from several sources is that the university has been under pressure to take action ever since Side Effects was published last June and Sen. Charles Grassley began investigating Keller’s undisclosed conflicts of interest in July. Keller is the latest psychiatry kingpin to fall. In recent months, Stanford’s chief of psychiatry Alan Schatzberg and Emory University’s chief Charles Nemeroff were forced to step down after reports that they too failed to disclose years of lucrative financial payments from the pharmaceutical industry.
[...]
In addition, the American Journal of Psychiatry, the pre-eminent journal of the profession, just published a review of Side Effects,[...]

Alison Bass: Brown psychiatry chief Martin Keller to step down in June…

Treating Borderline Personality Disorder with Dialectical Behavior Therapy

Posted by Andy Alt / http://mentaldimensions.wordpress.com

January 11, 2009

A few minutes ago I stopped doing nothing long enough to pick up my most recent copy of TIME magazine. The following are some excerpts from an article about Borderline Personality Disorder (Click the link below to read the full article). BPD is one of the things I have been told I have.

According to this article, it’s common for antidepressants to be ineffective with patients who have Borderline Personality Disorder.

[..]
Borderline patients are often overmedicated–partly because therapists see them as difficult–but for Lily, as for most borderlines, the meds did little. “Drug treatment for BPD is much less impressive than most people think,” Paris writes in Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder.
[...]

Blasphology 1104

By Andy Alt / Mental Dimensions

March 7, 2009

Creating and living in your own reality is like having an advanced security system installed in your home; but instead of only preventing intruders from entering, it will also prevent you from exiting.

My desire to promote psychiatric medication and their positive effects

By Andy Alt / Mental Dimensions

March 1, 2009

It may seem strange reading this on my blog, but I wanted to take the time to write about all the good that medications can do, and their positive effects. Some people may think that my brain has been affected by subliminal messages in the manufacturers’ advertisements, but because I’m currently consuming and withdrawing from all of these pharmaceutical drugs outlined below, I’m reasonably confident that my head is clear and my mind as sane as it ever was.

Effexor effectively treats my symptoms, and is effective at treating everything the manufacturer claims it can treat.

Wellbutrin makes me feel well, generally speaking.

Ambien surrounds me with a pleasant ambience, so I feel calm and relaxed, allowing me to sleep normally and naturally at night.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Pharmaceutical Advertisements

FDA Complicit in Pushing Pharmaceutical Drugs (http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/23-fda-complicit-in-pushing-pharmaceutical-drugs/)

While the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) turns a blind eye, drug companies are making false, unsubstantiated, and misleading claims in their advertising, often withholding mandated disclosure of dangerous side effects. Though companies are required to submit their advertisements to the FDA, the agency does not review them before they are released to the public. A Government Accountability Office report released November 2006 found that the FDA reviews only a small portion of the advertisements it receives, and does not review them using consistent criteria.
[...]

[ Project Censored ]

See Also: Pharma kickbacks and corruption (http://bipolarblast.wordpress.com/2009/02/25/pharma-kickbacks-and-corruption/) (February 25, 2009)