Monthly Archives: June 2012
Why the Delay Between Psychotropics’ Immediate and “Therapeutic” Effects?
Writing in Neuron that antipsychotics' "functional consequences and the subcellular sites of their accumulation in nervous tissue have remained elusive," researchers from Germany and...
Anxiety Accounts for Bipolar False Positives
Researchers found that of 1,534 patients assessed at Australia's Black Dog Institute Depression clinic, a significant number received a false positive diagnosis of bipolar...
US Senator Raises Concerns About Possible Stock Manipulation by Vertex Executives
Senator Charles Grassley is upping the ante on the controversy surrounding the Vertex pharmaceutical executives who cashed in on overstated clinical trial data --...
Antidepressants Cause Autism-Like Gene Expression in Fish
Prozac, Effexor, and/or carbamazepine induce gene expression patterns in the brains of fathead minnows that mimic those thought to be associated with autism in...
“Psychiatric Power: A Personal View” by Pat Bracken
Psychiatrist Pat Bracken, "a friend of Mad Pride Ireland," writes about the current state of psychiatry in the Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine. As...
Injuries and Mental Illness
A retrospective study of 6,234 Medicaid recipients in Maryland by researchers at Johns Hopkins and published online June 2, 2012 by the journal Injury...
Black Hats, White Hats, and Financial Reckonings
It is clear now that the marketing of ayptical antipsychotics over the past 20 years was, in essence, a criminal enterprise, as the makers...
Antidepressants Linked to Osteoporosis and Fractures
Researchers from Switzerland, the U.K., Belgium, Denmark, Canada, Italy, Austria and the U.S. review the current evidence linking antidepressants to loss of bone mineral...
Stress Response in Individuals and Families Predicts Psychosis
Researchers from King's College, London, reviewed all studies examining psychological and biological markers of the stress response in both individuals at high risk of...
SSRIs in The Atlantic: Forget the Science Bring on the Anecdotes
The Atlantic web site has just published a strange piece on the efficacy of the antidepressants. When getting into a discussion with about antidepressants with a...
Meditation Helps with Emotionality and Relationships
A meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin of 595 studies on the psychological effects of meditation found that in the 163 studies deemed to have "sufficient...
Telephone Therapy is Effective for Depression
A study of 325 Chicago-area patients with major depression, published today in the Journal of American Medical Association, finds that cognitive behavioral therapy administered...
Exercise as an Adjunct to Medication Does Not Help Depression
A study of 361 adults with depression published online in the British Medical Journal today finds no evidence that facilitated physical activity improved depression...
Association Between ADHD and Bipolar Disorder
Researchers in London review the literature on attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and bipolar disorder (BD), finding that "comorbidity and family studies appear to...
Similarity of Dissociation and Voice-Hearing in DID and Schizophrenia
A study of 40 patients with schizophrenia diagnoses and 40 patients with dissociative identity disorder (DID) found that "neither phenomenological definitions of dissociation nor...
Search for Schizophrenia Gene Marches On
In a study released June 6, 2012 through the online journal Behavioral and Brain Functions, researchers from Japan acknowledge that "the results of association...
Yoga Improves Cognition in Schizophrenia
Researchers from India and the Universities of Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania found, in the first study of its kind, significantly greater improvement in cognitive function...
More Support Sought When Others Attribute Depression to Biology
In a study of 86 individuals experiencing at least mild depressive symptoms, a person's willingness to seek support from a friend was not related...
Locus of Control Less Associated with Anxiety in Collective Societies
Locus of Control (LOC), a measure of the degree to which one perceives control of one's life to be internally- vs. externally-determined, was reviewed...
How Can We Stop So Great an Injustice?
I don't normally post items so close together but today NAMI Ohio has successfully convinced a State Senator to sponsor a bill that I...
Senator Pursues Questionable Pharma/Academic Ties
Senator Chuck Grassley continues his pursuit of questionable financial ties between the pharmaceutical companies and research by asking the National Institutes of Health (NIH)...
U.N. Calls for Investigation of Shocks at U.S. School for Autism
The U.N. special rapporteur on torture has opened discussions with the U.S. mission in Geneva as a first step toward investigating the Judge Rotenberg...
Media “Suicide by Cop” Portrayals Add to Misunderstanding
A study in Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior finds that representations of "Suicide by Cop" (SBC) in the media misrepresent the reality of people who...
Antipsychotics are Poor Sleep Aids
Research from Australia shows that "remained pervasive" in 70% of a sample of 83 patients medicated with antipsychotics and other medications, and concludes that...
PLoS Medicine Series: Global Studies of “Practice-Based Evidence”
The Public Library of Science calls for "case studies that can help broaden our understanding of global mental health in 'real-life' contexts." The series...
