June 18, 2013

The Vatican conference on “The Child as a Person and as a Patient: Therapeutic Approaches Compared,” which took place on June 14 and 15 in Rome, was not really focused—as I had thought it would be—on the merits of medicating children for psychiatric disorders. The two Americans who had tirelessly campaigned for this conference, Marcia Barbacki and Barry Duncan, had hoped that it would serve that purpose, but the Pontifical Council for Health Care Workers, as it invited speakers, decided on a broader, more diffuse agenda.
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Categorized in: ADHD, Blogs, Featured Blogs

March 26, 2013

Martin Harrow and Thomas Jobe have a new article coming out in Schizophrenia Bulletin that I wish would be read by everyone in our society with an interest in “mental health.” Harrow and Jobe, who conducted the best study of long-term schizophrenia outcomes that has ever been done, do not present new data in this article, but rather discuss the central question raised by their research: Does long-term treatment of schizophrenia with antipsychotic medications facilitate recovery? Or does it hinder it?
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Categorized in: Antipsychotics, Blogs, Featured Blogs, Schizophrenia/Psychotic Disorders

December 17, 2012

As many of the readers of this website know, David Oaks, the long-time leader of MindFreedom, was badly injured when he fell from a ladder on December 1. He broke a bone in his neck, his injury so severe he had to be on a ventilator. The latest news is encouraging: he had a tracheotomy and is off the ventilator, able now to speak in a whisper. Personally, I owe David a great deal, as it was an interview I did with him in 1998 that propelled me to write more in-depth about psychiatry.
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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs

October 26, 2012

After reading E. Fuller Torrey’s latest article in the Treatment Advocacy Center newsletter, in which he sharply criticizes Dr. Sandy Steingard for writing about anosognosia on madinamerica.com, and then goes on to attack me for my various writings, I have to confess that this time—after getting over the feeling that my head was going to explode—I thought, my patience with such dishonesty is running out.
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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs

July 11, 2012

If we want to understand how our society may end up deluded about the merits of psychiatric medications, we can look at the research published by Robert Gibbons, Director of the Center for Health Statistics at the University of Chicago, …
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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs

June 11, 2012

On Sunday, the New York Times ran a lengthy article titled “Risky Rise of the Good-Grade Pill,” and it illustrated, in vivid detail, how our society—and the medical community—may view a “drug of abuse” through one prism (as harmful) and a “prescribed drug” through another (as helpful), even though the drug in both cases is the same.
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Categorized in: Blogs

June 7, 2012

It is clear now that the marketing of ayptical antipsychotics over the past 20 years was, in essence, a criminal enterprise, as the makers of these medications regularly violated the law governing the selling of new drugs. The manufacturers hid …
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Categorized in: Blogs

May 16, 2012

E. Fuller Torrey, through his Treatment Advocacy Center, is the country’s most prominent advocate for outpatient commitment laws, which typically force people with a diagnosis of a severe mental illness to take antipsychotic medications. He has posted a review of …
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Categorized in: Blogs, Popular

April 21, 2012

Back in December,  when I decided to turn madinamerica.com into a webzine, I envisioned it as serving several purposes. I wanted to create a regular news report of research findings. I wanted to provide a forum for people to tell …
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Categorized in: Blogs, Community Updates

February 23, 2012

Martin Harrow has just published his 20-year outcomes data for schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders. Those who took antipsychotics regularly experienced more psychosis, more anxiety, cognitive impairment, and markedly fewer periods of “sustained recovery.” Harrow asks: “Is very long-term treatment with antipsychotic medications undesirable?”
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Categorized in: Blogs

February 20, 2012

Last week, Robert Gibbons reported in the Archives of General Psychiatry that fluoxetine was not found to increase the suicide risk in children compared to placebo. But if we closely examine the suicide data from the TADS trial, which at first glance seems to support Gibbons’ conclusion, we find a trail of hidden data and scientific scandal.
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Categorized in: Blogs

January 25, 2012

Recently, Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, identified the “NIMH’s Top 10 Research Advances of 2011.” He wrote: “This has been a year of exciting discoveries and scientific progress . . . Here are 10 breakthroughs and events of 2011 that are changing the landscape of mental health research.”

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Categorized in: Blogs, Coercion, Pregnancy & Birth Defects

January 12, 2012

The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA is one of the premier centers for brain research in the country, and so when the Institute announced in late December that its scientists had discovered a “brain cell malfunction in schizophrenia,” …
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Categorized in: Blogs, Pregnancy & Birth Defects