Writing on mental health is a dime a dozen. There are so many choices out there on the internet for readers. So, with this said, how does the name mentalhealthaffairs.org signal the critical shift readers are seeking on recovery.

This question requires some history. Similar to the looming crisis over the future of mental health treatment, during the Holocaust, the Nazi’s were fixated on answering questions too. The most infamous question, or answer, was the final solution. It is no mystery how Jewish people were treated by the Nazi’s. But less known is how the mentally ill were treated by Nazi medical interventionists, I would hazard to use the word doctors.

The urgency to shift the manner in which treatment is delivered is still a matter of life or death for many without adequate services and access to information. During the Second World War, the Nazi’s termed their government body for managing the final solution of the Jewish question as the office of Jewish affairs.

Here at recovery now, we choose to remember the voices of our not so distant history and legacies of people that survived during institutionalization and other medical & psychiatric interventions that maimed souls and destroyed futures. In doing so, we chose to re-appropriate the Nazi phraseology “Jewish affairs” for our purposes. Together we will re-define the manner in which mental health is treated at the very level of language.

Here at mentalhealthaffairs.org, we believe people carry diagnoses, they are not defined by them or limited by the branding of any clinician reading the DSM 5 or any manual or philosophy that put boundaries and establishes a prognosis around the future of a group of people. Such limited and superficial writing on mental health is what this blog aims to avoid and conversely chooses to defy openly with its domain name.

Ultimately, after centuries of torture & mistreatment due to a fundamental gap in research in mental health and related fields we are taking the ethical high ground and delivering information that is only person centered and leave it at your doorstep without harming this vulnerable population further. It is time for an urgent critique of existing bodies of knowledge out there. Here, we will challenge the experts, disrupt their hegemonic domination of the discourse, and suggest a better plan for people carrying a mental health diagnosis or struggling in their life with personal battles due to not being armed with the right information.