re "'Mr. Oaks, who was found to be schizophrenic and manic-depressive while an undergraduate at Harvard, says he maintains his mental health with exercise, diet, peer counseling and wilderness trips — strategies that are well outside the mainstream thinking of psychiatrists and many patients.'"

John Grohol is wrong in his critism here. The standard treatment for schizophrenia is medicate them until they can barely move, then force them to move.
The 25 years average shorter life span of the seriously mentally ill have , can be attributed to the sedentary lifestyle that comes from being in a life long medication stupor.

Reporters thoughts supported by this
Mentally ill die 25 years earlier LINK

I certainly had a hard time finding Gabrielle Glaser's story online on Saturday when I read about it here and went looking for it to find out where it was running. Why wasn't it in the Tuesday Health section, where it belongs?
Despite this curious location and the other criticisms of the piece, "Mad Pride Fights Stigma" was the first article, I could find in the NYTimes archives, that even mentions the concept of "mad pride," an underground movement with roots in the consumer/survivor anti-psychiatry movement dating back to the 1960s. "Mad Pride" is coming out all over the England, Australia, Germany, Japan, New Zealand and Australia, but rarely does it receive mainstream media attention in North America. Go looking. You won't find "Critical Psychiatry" and "Anti-Psychiatry" sentiments reported because of the blind acceptance as fact, that mental illnesses are caused by chemical imbalances in the brain. This "theory" hasn't been proven, yet, according to my psychiatrist, a former vice president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, president of the Ontario Psychiatric Association and associate professor of psychiatry on the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto.
It's high time the mainstream media explored the rich history and activities of other approaches to "madness," a word so many people with diagnoses of mental illnesses in other parts of the world are reclaiming because "mental illness" is a social construction dating back only a few centuries. This isn't news.
Having Glaser's story run in print in the widely distributed Sunday edition of the Times adds gravitas to the fact that there are alternatives to traditional psychiatry, even though she just hints at them, and does so lamely and inaccurately. There are psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers and other health professionals and non-professionals, people with lived experience, questioning these assumptions. This is healthy.
"Mad Pride Fights Stigma" was a start. It opened the door. Let's hope other stories will follow, in print. Better stories. They're long overdue.
Sandy Naiman, Toronto

The old Grey Lady ain't what she used to be, eh?

Sounds like that article is beginning to take a shellacking on a wide variety of fronts.

I have to wonder if Glaser feels a bit like all of us who first question mainstream psychiatry feel, sort of like your excellent piece about being maligned by label lovers and anti-psych's a like last week. It was a start, not as ill conceived or harmful as FP's typically sadistic psuedo punk comments imply.

Sally affiliates with a movement that pretends it's not anti-psychiatry and I'm a big meanie for pointing that out.

Ha ha.