Multiple topics day

First of all, some mental health consumer oriented blogs. I’m adding them to the links bar as well but am including the descriptions below:

http://www.furiousseasons.com/
Furious Seasons is authored by a journalist/patient Philip Dawdy who was diganosed with bipolar disorder and who seeks to hold the mental health industry accountable. The author is opposed to outpatient commitment and forced electroshock treatments.

http://pistachiopress.blogspot.com/
A variety of news items and opinions on a web log run by Patricia Lefave of Ontario, Canada “expressing the alternative views of those who are dissatisfied with the current state of the mental health system around the world and current and growing powers of bio-psychiatry and the psychiatric establishment”

http://bipolarblast.wordpress.com/
From the blogger: “I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 1985 at age 19. I was medicated off and on from 1985 to 1988 and then medicated in 1992 to the present after having the daylights scared out of me by what I now see as ignorant doctors. About three years ago I started questioning the heavy drugging of my symptoms as well as the diagnosis itself. I began the slow and difficult process of withdrawing from my psych meds. I hope to share with the readers of this blog this journey as it continues. This journey includes my ultimate disillusionment of psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry.”

http://recoveryfromschizophrenia.org/blog/
Ron Unger is a full-time therapist in Eugene, Oregon and Coordinator of MindFreedom Lane County. From Ron’s blog description: According to what has been called the medical model, people who have been diagnosed with “schizophrenia” and with “psychosis” in general, have a brain disease or chemical imbalance… While the medical model can easily be criticized for lacking evidence, a perhaps more important criticism of it is that it lacks any model for how people recover! If people have a brain disease today, how could they go on to have highly successful lives later? And why is it that most of those who are doing best have all long ago quit their “medical” treatment, psychiatric drugs? (I’ve talked with Ron and he’s a wonderful resource.)

http://www.stir-crazy.org/
“Shaking a stick at the state of mental health,” the stir-crazy blog is based in Minnesota. From the site: “stir-crazy.org is hosted and written by Christin. Additional posts are written by other participants in the Icarus Project – Minneapolis discussion group, but the opinions expressed therein are the respective author’s and not necessarily those of the group or the national Icarus Project. The Icarus Project – Minneapolis is also hosted by stir-crazy.org.”

This just from Spitzer News, related to disability rights I suppose:

NASA UNVEILS COSMIC IMAGES BOOK IN BRAILLE FOR BLIND READERS

At a ceremony held today at the National Federation of the Blind, 
NASA unveiled a new book that brings majestic images taken by its 
Great Observatories to the fingertips of the blind. The Great 
Observatories include NASA‘s Hubble, Chandra and Spitzer space 
telescopes.

“Touch the Invisible Sky” is a 60-page book with color images of 
nebulae, stars, galaxies and some of the telescopes that captured the 
original pictures. Each image is embossed with lines, bumps and other 
textures. These raised patterns translate colors, shapes and other 
intricate details of the cosmic objects, allowing visually impaired 
people to experience them. Braille and large-print descriptions 
accompany each of the book’s 28 photographs, making the book’s design 
accessible to readers of all visual abilities.

The book contains spectacular images from the Great Observatories and 
powerful ground-based telescopes. The celestial objects are presented 
as they appear through visible-light telescopes and different 
spectral regions invisible to the naked eye, from radio to infrared, 
visible, ultraviolet and X-ray light.

The book introduces the concept of light and the spectrum and 
explains how the different observatories complement each others’ 
findings. Readers take a cosmic journey beginning with images of the 
sun, and travel out into the galaxy to visit relics of exploding and 
dying stars, as well as the Whirlpool galaxy and colliding Antennae 
galaxies.

“Touch the Invisible Sky” was written by astronomy educator and 
accessibility specialist Noreen Grice of You Can Do Astronomy LLC and 
the Museum of Science, Boston, with authors Simon Steel, an 
astronomer with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in 
Cambridge, Mass., and Doris Daou, an astronomer at NASA Headquarters, 
Washington.

“About 10 million visually impaired people live in the United 
States,” Grice said. “I hope this book will be a unique resource for 
people who are sighted or blind to better understand the part of the 
universe that is invisible to all of us.”

The book will be available to the public through a wide variety of 
sources, including the National Federation of the Blind, Library of 
Congress repositories, schools for the blind, libraries, museums, 
science centers and Ozone Publishing.

“We wanted to show that the beauty and complexity of the universe 
goes far beyond what we can see with our eyes!” Daou said.

“The study of the universe is a detective story, a cosmic ‘CSI,’ 
where clues to the inner workings of the universe are revealed by the 
amazing technology of modern telescopes,” Steel said. “This book 
invites everyone to join in the quest to unlock the secrets of the 
cosmos.”

“One of the greatest challenges faced by blind students who are 
interested in scientific study is that certain kinds of information 
are not available to them in a non-visual form,” said Marc Maurer, 
president of the National Federation of the Blind. “Books like this 
one are an invaluable resource because they allow the blind access to 
information that is normally presented through visual observation and 
media. Given access to this information, blind students can study and 
compete in scientific fields as well as their sighted peers.”

The prototype for this book was funded by an education grant from the 
Chandra mission, and production was a collaborative effort by the 
NASA space science missions, which provide the images, and other 
agency sources.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the 
Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA’s Science Mission 
Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the 
Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology, 
also in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

I’m also adding the Spitzer site to my link list.

The Icarus Project Harm Reduction Guide for Comng Off of Psychiatric Drugs

The Icarus Project and Freedom Center’s 40-page guide gathers the best information we’ve come across and the most valuable lessons we’ve learned about reducing and coming off psychiatric medication. Includes info on mood stabilizers, anti-psychotics, anti-depressants, anti-anxiety drugs, risks, benefits, wellness tools, withdrawal, information for people staying on their medications, detailed Resource section, and much more. Written by Will Hall, with a 14-member health professional Advisory Board providing research assistance and 24 other collaborators involved in developing and editing. The guide has photographs and art throughout, and a beautiful original cover painting by Ashley McNamara.

Go here:

http://theicarusproject.net/alternative-treatments/harm-reduction-guide-to-coming-off-psychiatric-drugs