May 30, 2012

An Israeli study of 10,621 women found that those taking an SSRI more than 80% of the time were 1.4 times more likely to experience bone fractures or to initiate treatment for osteoporosis. The study appeared online in CNS Drugs on May 21, 2012.

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Categorized in: Antidepressants, In the News, Psychiatric Drugs, Research

May 30, 2012

Senior executives at Vertex Pharmaceuticals made millions of dollars each by selling company stock in the days after the Cambridge-based pharmaceutical reported promising clinical trial data on an experimental drug for cystic fibrosis. And then weeks after they cashed in, …
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Categorized in: Blogs

May 29, 2012

My last blog on this site was about how our federal and state governments are looking to make huge changes to our health care system. This is our window of opportunity to ask for everything that people on this site …
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Categorized in: Blogs

May 29, 2012

After a recent discussion with a client and his father about his journey and the tremendous progress he has made, they both gave me permission to share their story. I first encountered the client when he was 12 years old …
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Categorized in: Blogs | Tagged as: children, counseling, Empowerment, psychology, psychotherapy, resiliency

May 29, 2012

A prospective study in the American Journal of Psychiatry compares Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) with psychiatric management for borderline personality disorder, founding that outcomes after two years were equivalent for both groups. Both groups exhibited poor functional outcome after 36 months (53% neither employed or in school, 39% receiving disability). However, an editorial in the same issue reports that clinicians over-react to the immediate clinical presentations of borderline, but that the long-term outcomes are positive nonetheless.

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Categorized in: Adult, Disorders, In the News, Personality Disorders, Research

May 29, 2012

Researchers at the UCs Berkley and San Francisco, and the University of Miami, suggest in a paper in Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy that bipolar disorder is “related to a greater emphasis on reaching goals and also a problematic reactivity to reaching those highly desired goals.”

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Categorized in: Adult, Bipolar, Disorders, In the News, Psychotherapy, Research

May 28, 2012

I think that our mind and our capacity to use it to think clearly depends on our inner and outer dialogue. When we become too narrow in our thinking, which can be intensified by emotional disconnection from others and ourselves, …
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Categorized in: Blogs

May 28, 2012

Move over outdated chemical imbalance theory, now it is claimed that genetic misregulation underlies psychiatric disease, and that psychiatric drugs themselves can fix the genetic misregulation problem. ”Anti-psychotics and mood stabilizing agents are capable of promoting epigenetic modifications associated with an active transcriptional …
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Categorized in: Blogs

May 28, 2012

This is the first of 3 posts laying out the philosophical basis for Rxisk.org which will be live in the next few weeks.The others are Once is Never & the Unbearable lightness of being. “ a meeting with yourself and …
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Categorized in: Foreign Correspondents

May 28, 2012

Norwegian and Swedish researchers studied the experiences of 67 parents of children disabilities. They found that enhanced self-understanding and discussion of existential issues was the “core category” that strengthened parents to find new possibilities and priorities in handling the situation. A secure setting for sharing experiences with peers and for exploring emotions and connecting thoughts with bodily reactions was also important. Results appeared online in the Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences on May 24, 2012.

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Categorized in: In the News, Research

May 28, 2012

What if it were the sun that could cure you; would you have the courage to go and find it? Would you wear sunscreen? If it were the schools themselves that made your child unhappy and restless; would you take …
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Categorized in: Blogs, Recovery/Empowerment, Rethinking Psychiatry/Medical Model, Uncategorized | Tagged as: Alice Keys MD, Alternatives, bigger picture, children, Empowerment, questions, uncertainty

May 28, 2012

Researchers in Barcelona, Spain retrospectively reviewed the use of antipsychotics in 117,811 patients, of whom 9,855 were given combinations of antipsychotics and 13,763 were given unspecified combinations of drugs. The researchers found that “the scant evidence available regarding the efficacy of combining different antipsychotics contrasts with the high number and variety of combinations prescribed to outpatients.” The study appears in BMC Psychiatry.

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Categorized in: Adult, Antipsychotics, Disorders, In the News, Psychiatric Drugs, Research, Schizophrenia/Psychotic Disorders

May 28, 2012

Four out of five adults, youth, and family members of community mental health centers (CMHCs) in New Hampshire told researchers they are satisfied.  Three out of four said their quality of service is good, despite repeated budget cuts. How do …
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Categorized in: Blogs | Tagged as: community mental health centers, Mental health system satisfaction survey, New Hampshire, New Hampshire Public Mental Health Consumer Survey Project, NH Bureau of Behavioral Health, NH Institute on Disability, University of New Hampshire

May 28, 2012

Researchers at the University of Michigan and Yale reviewed the 278 studies presented at the 2009 and 2010 APA meetings that compared medications, finding that no industry-sponsored studies with negative results were presented. “This suggests that the APA meeting might be being used as an opportunity to make drugs seem more effective than they are,” says an author. Non-drug therapies get less attention, despite growing evidence that can be just as effective.

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Categorized in: In the News, Industry, Research

May 27, 2012

Texas is big. So are its politics, at the very heart of it all. I fell into mental health by sheer virtue of my own shared life experience for being psychiatrically diagnosed as living with Bipolar Depression in ’96.  At …
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Categorized in: Blogs

May 27, 2012

An article in the prestigious newspaper, Weekend Australian, 19 May 2012, written by Sue Dunlevy and entitled “Medical ‘Bible’ Squabble,” reports that friction over the proposed new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5) of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) has spilled …
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Categorized in: Op-Eds

May 26, 2012

I believe the question of whether to medicate or not cannot be kept separate from the question of whether or not to consider individuals responsible for their own state of mind, as well as their behavior.  That in turn cannot …
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Categorized in: Blogs | Tagged as: madness, mental health, mental illness, psychiatric medication, responsibility

May 26, 2012

A study published online today (May 26, 2012) in Current Psychiatry Reports recommends Zyprexa as “elusive” pharmacologic solution to anorexia nervosa. On the basis of four randomized clinical trials, the study finds Zyprexa superior to placebo, Thorazine and Abilify in its ability to promote “weight gain and/or reduction in obsessional symptoms.”

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Categorized in: Adult, Antipsychotics, Anxiety, Disorders, In the News, Psychiatric Drugs, Research

May 26, 2012

(As Memorial Day approaches, pause for a moment of memory, not only for our soldiers who have died in war, but those related to our area of concern that have died all over the world from human rights violations). Now …
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Categorized in: Blogs

May 26, 2012

Some other bloggers have been talking about managed care, and I wanted to share some action points for all of us. There are many things we can do right NOW to make our situations better. Currently about 21 states have …
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Categorized in: Blogs | Tagged as: coercion, corporate profiteering, federal health care, health, health insurance, HMO's, involuntary treatment, Medicaid input forum, Medicaid spending, mental health care integration, mental health reform, profit from mental health, Public Health Care, seclusion and restraints, single-payer system, stakeholder input

May 26, 2012

ECT-treated patients were at a greater risk of readmission compared to non-ECT treated patients, according to a study published online May 25, 2012 in the Journal of ECT. The study found that adjusting for planned readmissions masks the increased negative outcome associated with ECT.

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Categorized in: ECT, In the News, Research

May 26, 2012

A prospective study of 2,793 pregnant women by researchers from Yale, Tufts, and Ohio State University finds that antidepressant treatment doubles the risk of spontaneous preterm birth.

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Categorized in: Antidepressants, In the News, Pregnancy & Birth Defects, Psychiatric Drugs, Research

May 26, 2012

Rising prescriptions for psychiatric medications are partly a result of longer-term treatment and increasing population, according to an article by Joanna Moncrieff and Stephen Ilyas in the May, 2012 issue of British Journal of Psychiatry. Psych meds were an increasing proportion of all prescriptions in England between 1998 and 2010. Antipsychotics in particular, both costly and prescribed for uses beyond severe mental illness, are making an increasing contribution to total drug costs.

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Categorized in: Antidepressants, Antipsychotics, Benzodiazepines, In the News, Industry, Mood Stabilizers, Placebos, Psychiatric Drugs, Research, Stimulants

May 26, 2012

A study released online today by the British Journal of Psychiatry shows that the clinical profile of neuroleptic malignant syndrome (NMS) is similar in 1st- v. 2nd-generation antipsychotics. Patients presenting with NMS from 2nd generation are younger, with less rigidity and a lower mortality rate.

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Categorized in: Antipsychotics, In the News, Psychiatric Drugs, Research

May 26, 2012

Data derived from a study of 662 new mothers reveal that the 8% of them who had lost their homes to foreclosure in the previous two years exhibited a 1.76 greater risk for severe depressive symptoms during the week prior to birth than women not experiencing foreclosure.

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Categorized in: Adult, Depression, Disorders, In the News, Research