Category Archives: Veterans

Rethinking Psychiatry Film Festival Opens with Mind Zone

Opening night  Thursday, Feb 21, 2013

Mind Zone: Therapists Behind the Front LinesWe are proud and excited to kick off this year’s Rethinking Psychiatry’s film festival with the first public showing of the newly completed documentary, Mind Zone: Therapists Behind the Front Lines.

Mind Zone explores the controversies and challenges of keeping people in unhealthy places, of therapists as both healers and warriors. While public consciousness grows of the post-traumatic stress disorder and the alarming suicide rates among soldiers and veterans, the struggle of those attempting to diagnose and treat them has never been told. Mind Zone is their story.  

While making Mind Zone, director Dr. Jan Haaken, Portland State professor, clinical psychologist and documentary filmmaker was embedded with U.S. troops in Afghanistan. For the first time in historythe U.S. Army granted access to a team of filmmakers to document the challenges of maintaining mental and emotional healing on the front lines.

Dr. Haaken will introduce the film and answer questions afterwards.

Co-sponsored by

The Relationship Between Medication and Veteran Suicide

Dr. Peter R. Breggin, MDDr. Peter Breggin, MD was asked to testify before the U.S. House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs on the link between antidepressants and suicide.  He provided a detailed analysis emphasizing the science that demonstrates a causal relationship between the newer antidepressants and the production of suicide, violence, mania and other behavioral abnormalities. He emhasized the considerable risk in giving these drugs to heavily armed young men and women.

The newer antidepressants frequently cause suicide, violence, and manic-like symptoms of activation or overstimulation, presenting serious hazards to active-duty soldiers who carry weapons under stressful conditions.  These antidepressant-induced symptoms of activation can mimic post-traumatic stress disorder, and are likely to worsen this common disorder in soldiers, increasing the hazard when they are prescribed to military personnel.  Antidepressants should not be prescribed to soldiers during or after deployment.

View video of Dr. Breggin’s testimony (26 min)

Written testimony: Antidepressant-Induced Suicide, Violence, and Mania: Risks for Military Personnel