Happy to say that Harriet Fagerberg and I are writing a book, Biological Functions, for the Cambridge Elements series, with a focus on their role in medicine & psychiatry. It’s just heartbreaking that folks are still so confused about them after all these years… Harriet Fagerberg

I just think psychiatrists are doing incalculable damage to people's lives by depicting their problems as byproducts of disordered minds, and it’d be great if they thought about taking responsibility for their messaging and creating more empowering ways of thinking about distress

I’m enjoying Michael Pollan's Netflix series, How to Change Your Mind, but can’t help feeling psychedelics are being overhyped just a tad.

I’ve never read a book that was so funny I had to keep putting it down because I couldn’t breathe. I love Maria Bamford

Baudelaire wrote that the devil’s greatest trick is to convince you he doesn’t exist. I often think this about biomedical psychiatry.

Some people complain that the notion of trauma is overused. I couldn't possibly know whether it's overused or underused until I know the benefits and costs of framing one's experiences that way. Does it help? Does it illuminate? Does it heal?

In the last several months, I've been thinking much more about the ethics of dysfunction framings in psychiatry. Is it possible that biomedical framings of mental health problems can be ethically pernicious? What are our responsibilities as researchers, clinicians, advocates?

Beyond the “Chemical Imbalance” Theory: An Interview With Prof. Joanna Moncrieff, via Psychology Today Justin Garson Dr Joanna Moncrieff
madinamerica.com/2023/10/beyond…

I suspect when it comes to madness, we are unable to distinguish the suffering that stems from the intrinsic nature of the experiences, if you will, and that which stems from how those experiences are framed and managed by society. This creates a profound moral responsibility.

I have nothing in principle against the medicalized vision of psychiatry. What I detest is how it's come to insinuate itself so firmly in the conversation - and to so skillfully adopt various guises - that no other voices can be heard.

low-key kind of hate how the world is a theatre of pain and vale of tears in which we take turns blindly suffering and blindly passing along suffering, untouched by anything even potentially fully good, lost even to the possibility of comprehension or salvation or repair

Finally got to ask Dennett the question philosophers have wrestled with for decades: if I had the bat-like power of echolocation, would I still be human?