Dear Daniel, I really love your movie about the open dialogue in Finland. Allthough I am more interested in depression than in schizophrenia. I am writing a book on depression and I would like to know if you allow me to cite from your movie. Of course I am giving your full name and the name of the movie - event the internet link. ... and I am writing in german. So please tell me, if that is alright for you, because the publishing house needs this information. Many thanks Peter Ansari www.depression-heute.de

Hi Dan, Thanks for your beautiful work! You are a major inspiration. I have shared your videos (Take these broken wings, and the Finland and Swedish approaches) with so many people. I know you get asked this a lot, but do you know of any personal healing and transformation centers, therapists or spiritual teachers in the USA that are not focused on medicating people, and focused on helping them live in a more healthy way; reducing depression, anxiety and intrusive thoughts. A place that utilizing diet, exercise, yoga, expressive arts, spiritual development and trauma release work, that are non-profit or not predominantly profit focused in the USA? There has to be some innovative work going on somewhere in this country, that may not be on the Internet but is happening due to someone\'s dedicated spiritual and personal development work. I would like to to work with them. I have many skills to offer. So if you know anything now, or you hear of anything in the future, please keep me in mind. I am a licensed mental health practitioner, who knows there are better alternatives than medication and am looking to join with others to offer a healing community or center. (I am currently in California, but willing to relocate for the right situation.) I don\'t know if you know this, but Esalen Institute was originally founded by Dick Price and Michael Murphy. Dick was from a wealthy family, studying at Harvard, when he became deeply depressed. He was hospitalized by his family against his will, and given all the \"top treatments\" of the day, \"electroshock therapy\" insulin shock therapy.\" etc. It was all so traumatizing and barbaric, that he swore he would create something different. They were doing some very radical approaches at Esalen in the beginning. That place has since become a lot more conservative and profit oriented. I know you have to deal with financing such a place, but as one of my mentors expressed it: \"money is a very important, secondary consideration.\" Celebrating the music in all our hearts! Blessings on Your Journey, Suzanne

Hi Daniel, I found your and some of your work on YouTube and I find it refreshing. While there are some ideas I don\'t quite agree with you on, I am generally impressed with the work that you do. And actually I am writing with a (possible) strange question. I live in Los Angeles, but I am relatively new here (it\'s been 9 years, but it\'s still feels like \"new\"). I haven\'t been able to make many real friends or true connections. I have made a couple, but after reading your book, I even question how real they are. So I was wondering maybe you could connect me to some people in LA are who share your \"phylosophy\" (I guess you could all it that), or simply your ideas. I am not active on Facebook, so the best way would be to email me. I would really appreciate your ideas on the subject.

I recently stumbled upon your work. It gives me a little hope. I am so stuck right now. The ironic thing is that my own brother is a very well to do psychiatrist and does not talk to me. I\'m very sad about that but I realise my mental illness makes him uncomfortable. Such a shame. I have been on medications for years and trying to get off of them but there is just not enough support and I am poor. Poverty and mental illness goes hand in hand it seems and without love and family it requires even more strength and determination. lately I am finding it extra hard. I have no voice. But I want to thank you for giving people hope. Thank you for making people like me feel worthwhile. You are a blessing.

Dear Daniel, Your story is inspiring and like you I feel more youthful as i continue to heal the severe traumas of my childhood. I wrote a book; Healing the Wounds of Childhood: A psychologist\'s journey and discoveries from wretched beginnings to a thriving life. My entire personal and professional life has been about the healing journey. I would love to send you a copy of my book for your review; let me know if you would like that. Don St John, PhD.

Dear Daniel, your wonderful film \"Take these broken brings\" really impressed me. I am a psychoanalysis trainee and a blogger. I proposed your film on my blog here: http://www.medizin-im-text.de/blog/2015/39945/take-these-broken-wings-schizophrenie-heilen-ohne-medikamente/ I hope this is ok for you. Best wishes from Cologne, Germany Dunja Voos

Hi Daniel, We met in Melbourne 2013 for a viewing of your Open Dialogue film at Melbourne University. I wish to bring to your attention an artist in Vermont named Pamela Spiro Wagner. She has been exposing her experiences of the psych system in telling images the last few months and now is in Battleboro Memorial hospital, Vermont, (in her words) \'being tortured\' with mechanical and chemical attacks on her body. I\'m wondering if you could incorporate her story into a filmmaking project. Her artwork is very powerful. She has taken great courage to speak out. Pamela is asking you to write to News@reformer.com to get the media to investigate. She\'d appreciate support. I really don\'t want her to lose her ability to do art, or suffer further, nor would many other people she has engaged with. Pamela Spiro Wagner is, being condemned for her expression. Freedom of expression must be allowed in a democracy, dictators must not. Psychiatry wants to dictate what people can and can’t say, so the organised crime of white-coteries can continue. That’s not okay, nowhere near okay, it’s an outrage. Pamela\'s drawings and paintings are so honest and precise. For a long time visual art was her only means of communication. The world has to wake up and realise Pamela is just as much a political prison being tortured as Ai Weiwei. https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1188585741168785&set=a.583671808326851.143669.100000521105108&type=3&theatre best wishes Initia.

Hi Daniel, I came across Open Dialogue about 10 years ago (then met Jakko S in 2006), but had no means by which to spread the word, so to speak, until I came across and bought your DVD. In the time till now my DVD (and, ahem, a few copies) must have been seen by literally hundreds of folks down this way in or near Bristol, UK, including service users, their families, and networks; students and trainees; colleagues, managers and the Chief Exec of our NHS Trust. It has, on the whole, been received with overwhelming gratitude and admiration - both for the introduction of OD and for the film itself (psychiatric conference not so keen, mind!). It has helped inspire myself and dozens of others to peck away in campaigning to get something off the ground here in NHS land. I must have seen it 20 times and, consequently, meeting Markku Sutela at a very small OD conference in Helsinki felt like meeting my hero. Today, I received 2 dozen applications for a Peer Worker post - the final piece of our local (South Gloucestershire) jigsaw to enable us to join the UK national POD (peer supported open dialogue - as per the NYC Parachute model) research project, which will have 7 or 8 \'spoke\' Trusts setting up small teams of OD practitioners to trial this approach in the UK (training to Dec \'16, research project to Dec \'17). We will now make it onto this fantastic project. http://www.nelft.nhs.uk/aboutus-initiatives-opendialogue I\'ve expended blood, sweat and tears to make it happen, but it simply wouldn\'t have stood a chance without your film as an approachable doorway into a different way of thinking, practising, relating - and hoping. I, and our nascent project (both as a local trial and as part of the national POD) owe you the most enormous debt of gratitude for this... and I wouldn\'t be surprised if your film has done the rounds in many of the other 7 or 8 participating Trusts too. Daniel, I don\'t want to overplay the importance of what you\'ve given us - but I honestly don\'t think I can Thank You, Stu Brooke South Glos Crisis Team / Psychological Therapies

Mercci for the support

Dear Daniel Mackler and Matthew Morrissey: My name is Jackie Velnoskey. I saw that you have written A Way Out of Madness. My question for you is: may I promote the book at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books in L.A., early April? It costs you nothing. All I\'m asking you in return is if we may add you to our book marketing email list. I\'m giving you two LA Times promotion options to choose from: 1: you may forward a copy of your book to our address (see below), and we\'ll display it in L.A., or 2: we\'ll include your work in the Hot Indy Author Guide that we\'re displaying and distributing during the LA Times event. Either option is free. Check out our Facebook page when we report live from L.A. where over 150,000+ are expected to attend. At America Star Books we have a book promotion department that does nothing but offering book promotion at the lowest fees in the nation. We attend all of the big fairs and festivals: Book Expo America, London Book Fair, Frankfurt Book Fair, Miami Book Fair International, the American Library Association mid-winter and annual Conferences, Baltimore Book Festival, and so on. All I am asking you at this time is if we may add you to our email list when we issue our next book promotion offers. You may at any time unsubscribe, and we will promptly cease sending you any further emails. America Star Books has been around for more than fifteen years, serving over 60,000authors. Participating in book promotion is entirely optional. Thank you for considering this opportunity. I am looking forward to hearing back from you. --Jackie Velnoskey America Star Books Special Services, manager jackie.velnoskey@americastarbooks.pub 301-744-7589 P.O. Box 151 Frederick, MD 21705

Hi Daniel Having discovered you for the first time on YouTube yesterday I wanted to get in touch from the UK and welcome your honest and insightful observations about the practice of therapy and the training of therapists. I certainly admire your courage, as Voltaire (allegedly) said \'it is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong\'! Your recognition, clearly based on lots of experience, that many therapists are more troubled than their clients/patients certainly rings true from this side of the pond as well. Of course, the institutions that position the practice of psychotherapy within wider society reflect the interests of the people working in those institutions, not necessarily the people who use the services. The myth of diagnosis serves to entrench those interests, confusing the treatment of the human body as an object (rightly the domain of consensual medicine, requiring patient passivity and clinical expertise) with the exploration of human being as embodied possibility (which lies within the domain of philosophy and relies on the mutuality of dialogue). Having trained for many years as an attachment-based psychotherapist, I agree with much of what you say regarding the legacy of traumatic childhood experience. While I would never want to say that all behaviour and subjective experience is comprehensible to the external observer, surely it is fair to say that one should never reach a conclusion about its meaning until a person\'s history and their social context has been fully explored. In that sense, medical-diagnostic approaches can rightly be criticised as prima facie de-humanising. However, in the spirit of constructive dialogue and a shared desire to learn, I would like to explore a little more the tendentious notion of a \'good\' therapist. I too have never yet met a practitioner/clinician who doesn\'t articulate the view that they are acting in a patient\'s best interests. This seems to be universal. The \'mad-doctors\' working in 18th century \'mad-houses\' said the same as they brutalised the inmates of that era. Unfortunately, I think the simple truth is that a person choosing a therapist or reflecting on the value of a pre-existing therapeutic relationship can only rely on what you call instinct (as good a term as any). \'Goodness\' is something that only exists in the eye of the beholder and cannot be objectively determined, in the same way that madness or truth are not objectively determinable. What I find so admirable in the way that you present yourself is that it would provide a prospective client with a wealth of information prior to making contact. A person who has learnt to be suspicious of the yawning gap between what people say they do and what they actually do is therefore provided with some space to become familiar with the way you are/see yourself in the world before throwing themselves into the odd relational intensity that is created by psychotherapy. This makes me curious about why you stopped practising and I\'d be interested to know whether you found it easier to be open about yourself after you\'d stopped? For my part, I. too, stopped working as a therapist for a while because I simply couldn\'t bear to be associated with the absurdity of the mental health movement. Do you ever think about returning to practice? One thought I would like to challenge is the idea that therapy is inherently asymmetric in terms of power, with the patient/client being unusually \'vulnerable\'. In life, we can\'t avoid the need to take control over the people we become involved with (I\'m not referring to psychiatric coercion here, which is a civil liberties issue masquerading as medicine). I\'ve known people with genuinely healthy and supportive backgrounds who became embroiled in dreadfully confusing and manipulative relationships. The difference is not that some people have an ability to manage how a relationship will develop but rather that, when things go wrong, they can return to the care of friends and family, rather than being thrown back into despondent, self-recriminatory isolation. Equally, as I often advise people who are despairing of ever finding a good relationship, you only need to find one person! As with everything else in life, courage, resilience and tolerance for the shortcomings of others count for a lot. I also wonder if there are some cultural differences here. As I understand it, the US system is much more regulated and, with more treatment privately-funded, there is a greater need to create diagnoses in order for therapy to be funded as \'healthcare\'. Such a system is therefore very reliant on \'technical expertise\' or, as I would call it, the manufacture of pseudo-illness. Patients are therefore forced into passivity from inception, necessarily deprived of a language in which to frame their complaints. By way of contrast, in the UK therapy is still an unregulated lay activity (although it nearly fell victim to statutory regulation a few years ago). As many therapists act for third parties (more often the National Health Service or employers, rather than insurers) clients over here often enjoy what might be considered consumer rights and are not always shy of complaining. Equally, many therapists working in the public sector are relatively uneducated and come from working class backgrounds. This means that they can be quite oppressed by employers or more articulate clients. To my mind, patient \'vulnerability\' is not therefore an inevitable function of the therapeutic relationship itself but is instead induced by wider power interests that position psychotherapy within the world. I am sure there are lots of patients who have been entirely able and willing to tell their psychiatrist exactly where to stuff the medication that has been prescribed but judiciously recognise this will only result in further coercion or deprivation of liberty. Equally, the confident and well-educated can often induce shame and inadequacy in the less fortunate, irrespective of the chair in which they are sitting. To me, this leads to two conclusions. Firstly, I wholeheartedly endorse your view that therapists should make their training and views of the world transparent from the outset. There are many, many schools of therapy - plenty of them mutually contradictory - so this seems to be the minimum that is required to allow patients/clients to make informed choices. Personally, I also agree that therapists should be encouraged to go further and explain much more about their history and lifestyle. However, this does seem more a matter of individual preference. While I personally love your open, thought-provoking style, I\'d be willing to bet that it scared the life out of some of the people who came to see you, expecting instead a reserved, neutral \'professional\' - barely a person at all. Secondly, this analysis reinforces your idea that therapy is no panacea. Kinder communities, institutions and codes of personal conduct would be infinitely preferable to expanding the mental health movement. Learning from our children (not necessarily our own biological children) and other adults is more important than diagnosing and drugging those who make us uncomfortable into conformity. This seems to me to be an essentially a political struggle. Sadly, it seems to me that the US, once the proudest defender of individual liberty and a model of the benefits of independent thought, hard work and mutual co-operation, has now embarked upon a journey into pharma-induced torpor (sorry, that does sound a bit like Donald Trump but I guess there must be some reason he is popular over there). I worry about this because where the US leads, the UK usually follows. I was depressed to see that our own Lord Layard, an economist with no real knowledge of working as a therapist, has been doing the rounds in the US expounding the usual argument that \'mental illness\' does profound economic harm. As we know, the truth is the exact opposite. It is the mental health movement that inflicts terrible economic harm and personal tragedy by undermining personal autonomy and mutual co-operation. On a final, more positive note, nearly twenty years ago I was working in S Carolina assisting attorneys working on behalf of death row inmates. At the time, it seemed inconceivable that the US would turn against the obscenity of racist, state-sanctioned killing. Now, the death penalty is in terminal decline and mums in Colorado can legally buy marijuana cakes for the weekend. How times change!!! So keep going, my friend, our time will come! All the best Paul

I just came across your interview with Amy Childs in 2011, about Bryn Athyn and Swedenborgians. Wonderful stuff. I am kind of amazed to find such a down-to-earth approach from yourself and from Amy. I spent three years in Bryn Athyn. I totally agree with your evaluation on bringing up kids in this community. Our boy was 8 when we arrived and \'had to\' join the church school. Had to, because I was going through theological school to become a New Church minister. It took me a few more years before I couldn\'t stand it anymore. The whole thing makes a captivating story though. Which I wrote as a novel, called \'Ordained.\' Maybe you\'ll want to read it. See: https://muires.wordpress.com/ ____ The road to hell is paved with noble religious sentiments. Tell me about it… Ordained Part II America is about the time I spent in Bryn Athyn, PA, in theological school. It contains a fictionalized account of my experience in classes and in the college, with the different teachers who are employed there, as well as with the bishop. It contains accounts from the Experiential Learning projects we were assigned, including the counseling classes where invited guests told their stories of what had happened to them in the name of the New Church. It contains an account of a men’s group, as well as a detailed report of my first SWET weekend. It contains the rumors I overheard about life in Bryn Athyn, about people, about New Church history. It contains reports on the extensive medication, indoctrination and child brain washing (which we experienced first hand because our 8-year old son attended the church school). It contains accounts of the psychopathic imbalance that the bishop demonstrated in front of us all. It touches upon the issue of women in the ministry, and of homosexuality, of course. What do the clergy really think about gays and lesbians? And about premarital sex, about divorce and remarriage? What is the actual standpoint that is not admitted to? Finally it touches upon dissertation writing, the ordination procedure for ministers, and the requirements that theological school put upon us. Some of these were totally reasonable, some were fucking insane. Welcome to a novel about the New Church. Available from Amazon.

Greetings! I stumbled across one of your videos on YouTube. I found what you said resonating with my interpretations of my experience with therapists. I am mandated as a condition of my parole to participate in a sex offender program. I spent 12 years in prison where there was not even a superficial effort to provide help. Then, I get out 12 years later and I am mandated to be in an aggressive and intrusive program which uses such things as group bullying and polygraph tests as threats. Anyhow, due to my perspectives, background, and knowledge of certain things I believe I have been singled out by two of the therapists. This is very dangerous in my legal situation. I basically consider most of the practice terroristic bullying with thin veneer of we are thee experts and we care. I did my prison term without one disciplinary write up... basically a feat in such a volatile place...and have had a disciplinary incident free 2 1/2 years of parole. Now I am being required to go before a review due to the therapist \' telling on me\' - the charge? I\'m disruptive! I passed their polygraph and have been very compassionate to the others in the group - but I am a thought criminal because I have a mind or because I don\'t play the pretend game that the many of the successful subjects play. I am desperately looking for advice of help and truly wish that some caring organization or body would start an accountability process for these programs. Sincerely, Tom

Really enjoyed the \"Bullshit\" song on youtube. After the hideous side effects of twenty different medications and numerous therapies I broke free from the dark world of mental health. It can be done.