Tag: antipsychotic

Research finds that social cognition and emotional processing abilities can be disrupted by psychiatric drugs.

Researchers have found further evidence that the anticholinergic effect of psychiatric drugs can lead to cognitive impairments.

A recently published study from noted critical psychiatry expert Joanna Moncrieff explored the barriers that prevent clinicians from helping service users in discontinuing or...

Researchers examine how rapid discontinuation can mimic the relapse of mental health symptoms and confound psychiatric drug studies.

An interview with Professor Jim van Os who says that, arguably, ‘love is the most powerful evidence-based treatment in mental health’. We discuss his recent paper published in World Psychiatry which envisions a future for mental health that moves away from symptoms and diagnoses and towards peer support and lived experience.

Researchers reveal the limitations and misleading interpretations of two recent studies that claim to demonstrate that long-term antipsychotic use leads to better outcomes.

An interview with Dr. Sandy Steingard, Medical Director at Howard Center and Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the College of Medicine of the University of Vermont. Dr. Steingard serves as Board Chair of the Foundation for Excellence in Mental Health Care and is editor of the book 'Critical Psychiatry, Controversies and Clinical Implications' due in 2019.

The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists claimed that “the prescription of antidepressant or antipsychotic medications is something that a psychiatrist only ever does in partnership with the patient and after due consideration of the risks and benefits.” How could a responsible professional body make an assertion so patently wrong?

A partnership designed to decrease antipsychotic use in elderly patients may have led to increased use of medications with even worse risk/benefit profiles.

A recent RCT showed that vitamin B6 is as effective as propranolol for the treatment of akathisia.

A new study offers radical solutions for improving the cardiovascular health of people with mental health diagnoses: reducing antipsychotic prescriptions..

An interview with Sir Robin Murray, who is a Professor of Psychiatric Research at the Institute of Psychiatry. He is perhaps best known for helping to establish the neurodevelopmental hypothesis of schizophrenia, and for his work on the environmental risk factors relating to schizophrenia.

The researchers found that while antipsychotic drugs may be slightly more effective than alternative antidepressants, they come with a much higher side effect burden.

A new study in the journal Translational Psychiatry, an influential journal in biological psychiatry published by Nature, challenges the state of the research on antipsychotic drugs.

A common practice when antipsychotics are found to be ineffective for schizophrenia is to prescribe a second, additional psychoactive medication. Now, a new study suggests that this practice is not supported by the research.

Evidence of duplicate publishing in articles analyzing data from clinical trials testing second-generation antipsychotics for depression

Miriam Larsen-Barr's study is the largest to date on the subjective experiences of antipsychotic withdrawal, and the first to explore how people who have successfully stopped antipsychotics are able to maintain their well-being.

Association found between long-term antipsychotic use and poorer performance on cognitive tasks in adults diagnosed with ‘schizophrenia.’

Abilify, the antipsychotic developed by the Japanese Otsuka Group, is listed as the number four top-selling pharmaceutical, according to the influence. Article →

According to a recent meta-analysis, antipsychotic medications are not useful for preventing or treating delirium in hospitalized patients, despite their regular use for these...

For a long time I have felt that there just isn’t a good enough and long enough study on the pros and cons of long-term antipsychotic treatment versus reduction and discontinuation in people who have psychotic disorders, including those who are classified as having schizophrenia. Moreover, there are increasing reasons to be worried about the effects of long-term treatment with antipsychotics. I put this case to the UK’s National Institute of Health Research recently, and proposed that they fund a trial to assess the long-term outcomes of a gradual programme of antipsychotic reduction compared with standard ‘maintenance treatment.’ The NIHR agreed that this was an important issue, and that a new trial was urgently needed. The RADAR (Research into Antipsychotic Discontinuation And Reduction) study officially started in January 2016.

When I wrote Anatomy of an Epidemic, one of my foremost hopes was that it would prompt mainstream researchers to revisit the scientific literature. Was there evidence that any class of psychiatric medications—antipsychotics, antidepressants, stimulants, benzodiazepines, and so forth—provided a long-term benefit? Now epidemiologists at Columbia University and City College of New York have reported that they have done such an investigation about antipsychotics, and their bottom-line finding can be summed up in this way: Psychiatry’s “evidence base” for long-term use of these drugs does not exist.

A Quebec City pharmacy claims it accidentally mixed antipsychotic drug pills into a candy basket that was distributed to trick-or-treating children.

Remember “Colonel Mustard in the kitchen with the candlestick”? From the game called “Clue” in which you tried to solve a murder mystery? There’s a current, all-too-true and serious mystery involving devastating consequences – even death – for uncounted but vast numbers of people, but in this one the culprits are known to a very few, while their motives remain mysterious. The story starts in 1995, when the man widely considered the world’s most important psychiatrist split a payoff of nearly one million dollars with two colleagues in exchange for doing two patently unethical and illegal things that created the groundwork for a major drug company to market falsely one of the most dangerous psychoactive drugs.

So, thanks to everyone who has read and commented on my stories of reentry into the mental health system. I have now had eight nights of very good sleep and my mental health symptoms are back to the baseline. Baseline for me means I only get separated from consensus reality when a significant trauma occurs at the same time I'm having a pretty good sleep deficit. Usually I can manage it myself simply by being aggressive about handling — and increasing — the sleep. So this time I was unable to break that cycle and got some more drugs to help.