That Mind Freedom website reminds me a lot of the pro-ana websites.

For those unfamiliar, pro-ana sites claim that anorexia and bulima are good conditions, not bad. "Anorexia is a lifestyle, not a disease" is their main mantra. The sites provide pictures of emaciated girls for what they call 'thinspiration', facts of how much various celeberties weigh, tips on how to starve yourself, and other nausiating things. The sites are basically to provoke excitment and give encouragment to people suffering form anorexia -- excitment and encourgament which can lead many such people to death.

Anyway, that Mind Freedom site is similar, especially with their twisting more commonly used language as with 'psyhciatric drugs' vs our 'psychiatric medication', and 'psychiatric survivors' vs our 'psychiatric patients', in order to bring some disturbing points across. It's all very irksome.

What's even more irksome however, is that there are orginizations out there that, unlike this one, that actually present themselves to be very mainstream when it comes to mental health.

For instance, about a year ago, I was surfing the web, trying to find a publication which might accept one of my articles about an individual's recovery from biploar disorder. After surfing around for a while, I came across this UK mental health magazine, OpenMind, which printed articles just like the one I wanted to submit. Score! I put the article in the mail. Sure enough, about a month later, I recieved an email from the editor at OpenMind saying that she liked my piece and wanted to print it. Double Score! I was very pleased.

After the initial thrill of being internationally published had passed, I wanted to thoroughly check out this OpenMind mag place. I discovered that the magazine was produced by an orginization called Mind -- a UK orginiaztion which seemed a lot like the US equivilant of NAMI (National Alliance for the Mentally Ill). How nice. But then...I started reading their policy and some of the past articles of OpenMind...and it seemed like there was a whole lot of anti-meds stuff. I was kind of confused. At first I thought that maybe I was just accidentily hitting the wrong things...but the more I read, the more it seemed that the whole make up of this place, the whole reason why they existed, was to make people EXTREMELY wary about medication.

This distressed me. Why would the leading mental health orginiztion in the UK be so misleading of people in terms of proper mental health? What's up with this???

So anyway, about Mind Freedom, yah, that kind of stuff is obnoxious, and I completely agree with your point on how we all have to be skeptical.

By the way, my OpenMind aritcle is going to come out this week...Yikes!!!