CHARMentalWealth @CHARMManchester

⚠️ WARNING: When you take psychiatric drugs, you are unknowingly participating in an “uncontrolled real-world experiment.” For Danielle, it all started with an ADHD diagnosis in 2nd grade — simply because she was distracted in school — an environment not well-suited for any child to be their true selves. “Instead of the medications being questioned, my reactions were interpreted as new or worsening psychiatric symptoms.” ✔ More medications added as the default response. ✔ Life-altering neurological damage. ✔ Emotional damage. ✔ Permanent sexual dysfunction. ✔ Short-term clinical trials that never examined long-term effects. 💡 Have you been prescribed psychiatric drugs? What was your experience?

Flawed data used to try to inflate the value of the FDP! + NHS trusts pushed to suggest improvements “before the tools are fully embedded and before the evaluations are done”. Trigger the break clause! Keep #Palantir out of NHS. ft.com/content/977aed…

BuDS has expressed strong concern about the Interim Report from the Timms Review of Personal Independence Payment (PIP) calling it ‘incomplete’, ‘less than honest’ and ‘calculatedly misleading’. A 🧵 1/5 buds.org.uk/interim-report…

How can football management help people who hear voices? By Rufus May and Kate Quinn madintheuk.com/2026/07/how-ca… #HearingVoices #MentalHealth #TraumaInformed #Psychology

Studies now present a striking picture of what happens when private equity firms acquire hospitals and nursing homes: predictable increases in harm and deaths. One landmark study shows: patient deaths up about 11% after such acquisitions.

🧵 Losing motivation during psychiatric drug tapering can make an already difficult process feel even harder. It's one of the most common challenges people discuss in peer communities, including our Exchange, where members also share the small things that helped them keep going. Here are six ideas worth trying... 1/8

🚨 BREAKING: The Timms Review is right to find that the process of claiming PIP can be ‘dehumanising’ and ‘soul destroying’. Sadly, this reflects the experiences of disabled people coming to food banks in our community every day. Disabled people are already three times more likely to face hunger, and 75% of people coming to food banks are disabled. PIP should be supporting disabled people to overcome the additional barriers they face, but right now, it’s creating more. People face unnecessary bureaucracy, delays, and incorrect decisions. Time and energy that could be spent on progressing life goals, including in employment, is instead spent fighting the system. But it doesn’t have to be this way. We have published six proposals that would make PIP more efficient and remove fear from the assessment process. A system that gets decisions right first time is also a more compassionate system that will protect disabled people from hardship and give them the security to get on with their lives.

Excellent article looking at the over prescribing of disenfranchised groups in prisons and care homes for example. Over prescribing is easier than sorting out social problems but also acts as a pharmacological straight jacket to keep people docile.

Medicating Normal @MedicatingNorm1

2 weeks ago

Commentary article written by psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner, Victor Petreca, Ph.D.: "The overprescribing crisis is real. But the current debate overlooks the most vulnerable patients" #MentalHealth #psychiatry wbur.org/cognoscenti/20…

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"I’m not just a walking quote or story." Read ‘Not Just a Story’, a report into the experiences of engaging with the media as people with lived experience of mental ill-health, distress or trauma. nsun.org.uk/resource/not-j…

Psychiatrists are in no position to claim ECT is safe or effective. Their knowledge of its basics is sorely lacking. They typically don't understand the laws of electricity. They are, in essence, machine operators who set knobs and push buttons without understanding the ramifications of what they do. Psychiatrists also fail to recognise the brain damage they inflict on unsuspecting patients when they push the "treat" button to induce a grand mal seizure. The anaesthetic and paralysing drugs used on patients actually raise the seizure threshold requiring an increased intensity of electric current to produce a seizure. And the more ECT treatments a patient gets, the higher their threshold. So, psychiatrists crank up the electricity even further, each time. This causes brain damage whether the patient is under sedation or not. #MentalHealth #MentalHealthMatters #ECT #electroshock #MentalHealthAwareness #psychiatry

“When I listened to Stuart Ayris give evidence, I wasn’t shocked—I was saddened. Here was a former mental health nurse describing patients being left waiting, staff shutting themselves away in offices, paperwork taking priority over care, observations being used to protect the Trust rather than the patient, and serious incidents failing to bring lasting change. He spoke about a culture where speaking up could damage your career. If that’s true, then it raises a fundamental question: how many opportunities to prevent harm were lost because people were too afraid to challenge what they were seeing? What struck me most was his admission that he became ashamed of how little patients’ lives were really understood. That matters. Every patient is a person, not a risk to be managed or a set of forms to complete. For fourteen years I’ve been asking whether the system was more focused on protecting itself than protecting patients. Hearing those words from someone who worked inside it makes that question even harder to ignore. The purpose of this Inquiry cannot simply be to document what happened. It has to expose why these cultures were allowed to exist and who was responsible for changing them.” —/ I also want to thank Stuart Ayris for giving his evidence with such honesty. It cannot have been easy to speak publicly about what he witnessed or to revisit those experiences. It takes courage to stand up and tell the truth as you saw it, and I hope others who have relevant evidence or experiences will feel able to do the same. Every honest account helps the Inquiry build a clearer picture of what happened and why. That openness is essential if we are to learn the truth and prevent the same failures from being repeated. #LampardInquiry #MatthewsCampaign #MentalHealth #PatientSafety #SpeakUp #Accountability #Truth #EssexMentalHealth #MentalHealthCare #NeverAgain bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…

Take action for Dr Abu Safiya, director of a hospital in Gaza who is being imprisoned and tortured by Israel. Write to the Foreign Office to demand the release of all unjustly detained Palestinian prisoners palestinecampaign.eaction.org.uk/gazadoctorpris…

Shifting Acute Mental Health Care to the Home Limits the Cycle of Rehospitalization, Study Finds By Richard Sears New research shows intensive home treatment provides lasting benefits over inpatient wards but requires stable housing & systemic support. buff.ly/SiM9r4s

Senior execs must be held accountable. The law must change, just like in Nottingham with the Ockenden enquiry, Essex execs think they can avoid responsibility. We need the Hillsborough law to apply to all senior managers in public service. Stay safe and thank you @MelanieLeahy

Melanie Leahy @MelanieLeahy

2 weeks ago

Today was another difficult day at the Lampard Inquiry. Listening to the evidence, I couldn’t help but think how many times I have heard the words, “We’re sorry.” After almost fourteen years of fighting for the truth about Matthew’s death, apologies are no longer enough for me.

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A balanced discussion of the neurodiversity concept: 'To say that someone has ADHD or has autism is to offer a particular way of describing a complex constellation of behaviors, feelings, relationships, and life experiences, as interpreted through a psychiatric lens. It is not to identify a thing that people “have”'. psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/the-be…

Complex PTSD (C-PTSD) and PTSD are not the same. Both follow exposure to trauma, but C-PTSD includes additional disturbances in self-organisation that extend beyond classic PTSD symptoms. Here are 5 key features clinicians should know when differentiating C-PTSD from PTSD: 🧵👇

A few hundred people walked into a university clinic, most of them depressed or anxious. Some were handed one small task: write a single thank-you letter a week, for three weeks. Three months later, a brain scanner picked up what those letters had left behind. That is the study under this tweet. Prathik Kini and a team at Indiana University ran it about a decade ago, and what gets boiled down to "gratitude rewires the brain" is gentler and stranger than the slogan. Look at who they studied first. Almost every gratitude experiment before this one used happy, well-adjusted college students. This team went looking for people who were actually struggling, signing them up the week they started counseling, when they scored low on mental health. Nearly 300 of them. The question that mattered was whether gratitude helps someone in pain, not just someone who already feels fine. The task was tiny. One letter a week, to a person they had never properly thanked. Three letters, and that was the whole thing. And they were told they did not have to send them. Only 23 percent did. The other 77 percent wrote to a parent or an old friend, never sealed the envelope, and got better anyway. The benefit was not in the other person reading it. It was in sitting down and searching your own life for someone worth thanking. It also grew, which is the strange part. One week after the writing stopped, the gratitude group looked no different from anyone else. By four weeks they were clearly doing better, and by twelve weeks the gap had widened further. Most feel-good habits lose their effect as time passes. This one did the opposite. When the team looked at why, the answer surprised them. It was not that the grateful writers used more happy words. It was that they used fewer bitter ones. Gratitude worked by leaving less room for resentment and envy, and less room to replay the worst parts of your day. Then the scanner. Three months after the letters began, some of the writers and non-writers did a task where they could give away real money whenever they felt thankful. The gratitude writers showed stronger activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain tied to learning and choices, when gratitude hit. The researchers stayed careful. They called the result suggestive, not proof, and said gratitude "may help train the brain to be more sensitive" to feeling thankful over time. So the honest version is quieter than "neuroplasticity in action," and in some ways it is better. The brain change was small, and even the people who found it would not oversell it. What clearly worked was almost too simple. People in pain sat down once a week and looked for someone to thank, and months later they were steadier than the people who did not. You do not need anyone to receive the letter. The reaching is the part that heals.

Nicholas Fabiano, MD @NTFabiano

3 weeks ago

Being grateful rewires the brain. Neuroplasticity in action.

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For five years she spoke only in single syllables, and her family had quietly accepted that the woman they knew was no longer reachable. Then, 19 hours after a high dose of psilocybin, she woke at 3:30am and talked about her own life for four hours. She was an 80-year-old Japanese-American woman, about ten years into advanced Alzheimer's. She couldn't dress herself, couldn't walk without help, and hadn't controlled her own bladder in years. The case was published this May in Frontiers in Neuroscience by a team of doctors in Sao Paulo. What they actually think happened is stranger than a cure. They are not saying the mushrooms reversed the disease. Their read is that her memories and skills were never erased in the first place. They were locked behind brain wiring too damaged to reach, and the psilocybin pried open a temporary detour around the damage. The detail that surprised them most was not the talking. It was the bladder. Regaining continence after five years takes some of the highest-level coordination the brain is capable of. If that switched back on, the circuit was never gone. It was offline. There is a long precedent for this. For two centuries, doctors have recorded dementia patients who suddenly snap back into full clarity, talking and remembering, often in the final days before death. A recent US study across NYU Langone and Bellevue tracked these episodes in real time and found more than 60% of severe dementia patients had them. So the abilities coming back was never the real mystery. The new part is that someone may have triggered that return on purpose, with a drug, instead of waiting for it to arrive near the end. The mechanism is still fuzzy. Psilocybin acts on a serotonin receptor spread across the thinking part of the brain, and a 2024 Nature paper showed it briefly desynchronizes the whole system, loosening its rigid, stuck firing patterns. In a damaged brain, that loosening may let nerve impulses find new routes. It touches none of the plaques that define Alzheimer's. It just reroutes around them, which is close to the opposite of how current drugs work. The caution here is heavy, and the authors say it louder than anyone. One patient. No placebo, no brain scans, no formal cognitive testing. The effects were temporary. The dose set off a fever, drenching sweats, and a sleep so deep they suspected she was unconscious, and they cut it down the second time. Every expert attached to the story repeated the same warning: do not try this at home with a fragile elderly relative. It leaves behind a harder question. In late-stage dementia, the person may still be in there, buried behind a wall we have never had a way to reach.

For all Curious @fascinatingonX

4 weeks ago

🚨: A woman with late-stage Alzheimer's who hadn't spoken in 5 years, received psilocybin and started talking, recalling memories and making jokes, after just 19 hours

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Being grateful rewires the brain. Neuroplasticity in action.

NHS England forced to admit its data does NOT prove Palantir's effectiveness MPs call for independent audit, as ministers consider ending the NHS contract with Palantir ft.com/content/9348bc…

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