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‘Coyote’s Swing: A Memoir and Critique of Mental Hygiene in Native America’ by David Edward Walker

March 3, 2023 by David Clark

I am pleased to announce the release of David Walker’s new book Coyote’s Swing, in which he condemns the U.S. mental health system’s partnership with the pharmaceutical industry and presents research on this system’s history of complicity with Native oppression.

Here is the press release, author biography, and a review (NB. I have broken up some of the long paragraphs to make online reading easier):

Psychologist’s Experiences and Research Expose How Western Mental Health Ideology Threatens Native Lives and Culture

‘PULLMAN, Wash.— David Edward Walker combines firsthand experiences as a consulting psychologist with rare history and sociocultural critique to expose how the U.S. mental health system reframes Native American reactions to oppression and marginalization into “mental disorders” and “mental illness.”

‘Psychiatric drugs are doing us more harm than good’ by Peter Gøtzsche

May 5, 2014 by David Clark

This excellent blog appeared in The Guardian recently.

‘As with benzodiazepines in the 1980s, the UK is prescribing SSRI antidepressants at a staggering rate – and to no good effect

We appear to be in the midst of a psychiatric drug epidemic, just as we were when benzodiazepines (tranquilisers) were at their height in the late 1980s. The decline in their use after warnings about addiction led to a big increase in the use of the newer antidepressants, the SSRIs (selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors).

Figures released by the Council for Evidence-based Psychiatry, which was set up to challenge many of the assumptions commonly made about modern psychiatry, show that more than 53m prescriptions for antidepressants were issued in 2013 in England alone. This is almost the equivalent of one for every man, woman and child and constitutes a 92% increase since 2003.

‘A healthy mind in a healthy society’ by Dinyar Godrej

October 16, 2013 by David Clark

Here’s a wonderful blog on the mental health scene from the New Internationalist magazine.

Sitting in the waiting room of a busy psychologists’ practice in Rotterdam, I’m intrigued by the furtive nature of the experience. People waiting for their 50 minutes of focused talk avoid each other’s eyes, acknowledging each other with embarrassment, if at all. I could be in the waiting room of a sexually transmitted diseases clinic.

I’m a bit puzzled. With the increased familiarity of stress-related problems nowadays, shouldn’t this kind of guilt (no other word quite captures it) be a thing of the past?

‘Coyote’s Swing: A Memoir and Critique of Mental Hygiene in Native America’ by David Edward Walker

‘Psychiatric drugs are doing us more harm than good’ by Peter Gøtzsche

‘A healthy mind in a healthy society’ by Dinyar Godrej

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