Edwin Fuller Torrey, is an American psychiatrist and schizophrenia researcher. He is associate director of research at the Stanley Medical Research Institute (SMRI) and founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center (TAC), a nonprofit organization whose principal activity is promoting the passage and implementation of outpatient commitment laws and civil commitment laws and standards in individual states that allow people diagnosed with severe mental illness to be involuntarily hospitalized and treated throughout the United States.
Ronald David Laing, usually cited as R. D. Laing, was a Scottish psychiatrist who wrote extensively on mental illness—in particular, psychosis and schizophrenia. Laing's views on the causes and treatment of psychopathological phenomena were influenced by his study of existential philosophy and ran counter to the chemical and electroshock methods that had become psychiatric orthodoxy. Laing took the expressed feelings of the individual patient or client as valid descriptions of personal experience rather than simply as symptoms of mental illness. Though associated in the public mind with the anti-psychiatry movement, he rejected the label. Laing regarded schizophrenia as the normal psychological adjustment to a dysfunctional social context, although later in life he revised his views.
Daniel H. Pink is an American author. He has written seven New York Times bestsellers. He was a host and a co-executive producer of the National Geographic Channel social science TV series Crowd Control. From 1995 to 1997, he was the chief speechwriter for Vice President Al Gore.
Is There No Place On Earth For Me? is a nonfiction book written by Susan Sheehan and published in 1982 by Houghton Mifflin. It won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. This book recounts the lonely, harrowing life of Sylvia Frumkin who is diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Elyn R. Saks is associate dean and Orrin B. Evans Professor of Law, Psychology, and Psychiatry and the Behavioral Sciences at the University of Southern California Gould Law School, an expert in mental health law, and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship winner. Saks lives with schizophrenia and has written about her experience with the illness in her award-winning best-selling autobiography, The Center Cannot Hold, published by Hyperion Books in 2007. She is also a cancer survivor.
Jeffrey Alan Lieberman is an American psychiatrist who specializes in schizophrenia and related psychoses and their associated neuroscience (biology) and pharmacological treatment. He was principal investigator for CATIE, the largest and longest independent study ever funded by the United States National Institute of Mental Health to examine existing pharmacotherapies for schizophrenia. He was president of the American Psychiatric Association from May 2013 to May 2014.
Political abuse of psychiatry, also commonly referred to as punitive psychiatry, is the misuse of psychiatry, including diagnosis, detention, and treatment, for the purposes of obstructing the human rights of individuals and/or groups in a society. In other words, abuse of psychiatry is the deliberate action of having citizens psychiatrically diagnosed who need neither psychiatric restraint nor psychiatric treatment. Psychiatrists have been involved in human rights abuses in states across the world when the definitions of mental disease were expanded to include political disobedience. As scholars have long argued, governmental and medical institutions code menaces to authority as mental diseases during political disturbances. Nowadays, in many countries, political prisoners are sometimes confined and abused in psychiatric hospitals.
Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America is a book by Robert Whitaker published in 2010 by Crown. Whitaker asks why the number of Americans who receive government disability for mental illness approximately doubled since 1987.
Robert Kolker is an American journalist and contributor to The New York Times Magazine who previously worked as a contributing editor at New York Magazine and projects and investigations reporter for Bloomberg News and Bloomberg Businessweek.
Psych Central is a mental health information and news website. Psych Central is overseen by mental health professionals who create and oversee all the content published on the site. The site was created in 1995. The site was named as one of the Internet's 50 Best Websites in 2008 by Time, and has approximately 6 million unique visitors per month. PsychCentral was acquired by Healthline in August 2020. Former attorney and author, Faye McCray was appointed Editor-In-Chief in 2021.
Shankar Vedantam is an American journalist, writer, and science correspondent. His reporting focuses on human behavior and the social sciences. He is best known for his Hidden Brain family of products: book, podcast, and radio program.
Julia Flynn Siler is an American journalist and nonfiction author.
Lori Schiller, now Lori Jo Baach, is the author of the memoir The Quiet Room-- A Journey out of the Torment of Madness. When she was 17, she began to hear voices, and was later diagnosed with schizo-affective disorder. The Quiet Room--A Journey out of the Torment and Madness follows her story as well as her family and friends as they navigate her mental disorder.
Esmé Weijun Wang is an American writer. She is the author of The Border of Paradise (2016) and The Collected Schizophrenias (2019). She is the recipient of a Whiting Award and in 2017, Granta Magazine named her to its decennial list of the Best of Young American Novelists.
Lynn Eleanor DeLisi (née Moskowitz) is an American psychiatrist known for her research on schizophrenia. She is an attending psychiatrist at the VA Boston Healthcare System and a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She is the editor-in-chief of Psychiatry Research and the president of the Schizophrenia International Research Society. She was a co-founder of both the Schizophrenia International Research Society and the International Society of Psychiatric Genetics, and went on to serve as secretary of both organizations. She was one of two founding editors-in-chief of Schizophrenia Research, which she founded with Henry Nasrallah in 1988. She is also the author of the best-selling book 100 Questions and Answers about Schizophrenia: Painful Minds. She was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2014.
Sarah Monique Broom is an American writer. Her first book, The Yellow House (2019), received the National Book Award for Nonfiction.
The Collected Schizophrenias is a 2019 collection of essays by Esmé Weijun Wang. Published by Graywolf Press, it won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, as well as the Whiting Award for Nonfiction.
Sam Dolnick is an American journalist, film and television producer, and assistant managing editor for The New York Times. He helped launch The Daily podcast and the documentary series, The Weekly.
The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America is a book written by Greg Grandin, which won 2020's Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, on the role of the frontier from the American Revolution to the presidential election of 2016.
Kenneth R. Rosen is an American writer, journalist and war correspondent based in Central Europe. He is the recipient of the Bayeux Calvados-Normandy Award for war correspondents and has been twice a finalist for the Livingston Awards. Rosen is the author of two nonfiction books, Bulletproof Vest and Troubled: The Failed Promise of America’s Behavioral Treatment Programs, which were published in 2020 and 2021 respectively. He is a contributing writer at Wired. He has also written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atavist, Politico and others.
