Yearly Archives: 2015

In his reaction to Dr. Makari’s Opinion piece in the ‘Times, entitled Psychiatry’s Mind-Brain Problem, Dr. Nardo articulates why the legacy of NIMH director Thomas Insel is so dangerous. “He may have kept the researchers from spinning off and following some idiosyncratic path, but he did it by forcing them to follow his own idiosyncratic path.”

Susan Perry of MinnPost reviews “a charming essay” entitled “The Madness of Charlie Brown” that appeared in The Lancet. “Written by British psychiatrist Dr. Athar Yawar, the essay provides gentle and tongue-planted-firmly-in-cheek psychological profiles of the major characters in “Peanuts,” one of the most popular comic strips of all time.”

Language is important. And when language dictates specific treatment protocols, it should be used with extreme scrutiny. Using the wrong words can put vulnerable people at risk—not only to their sense of self-worth, their sense of self-knowledge, and they way they are treated, but also to their health.

Different types of child abuse have equivalent psychological effects, according to a study in JAMA Psychiatry. It has previously been assumed that emotional and verbal abuse could have different or less harmful impact on a child’s psychology than physical or sexual abuse, but research now suggests that these forms of abuse can be just as damaging.

The author has a BS in Biology/Health Science and went on to complete a professional post-graduate master's program and certification. While starting their career,...

NCMHR works to ensure that consumer/survivors have a major voice in the development and implementation of health care, mental health, and social policies at the...

The American Academy of Pediatrics came out with new recommendations that suggest doctors screen all of their child patients for hunger. About 16 million children in the US live in food scarcity and poverty that can lead to physical health issues as well as behavioral issues, which can then be misdiagnosed.

In this month’s Schizophrenia Bulletin, a person diagnosed with autism, OCD, obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, and major depressive disorder provides a first-hand close reading and description of their own psychiatric experiences.

Since the time of Freud, the field of psychotherapy has assumed that modalities and techniques were the instruments of change in psychotherapy. But the evidence is mounting that modalities and techniques have relatively little to do with effectiveness; evidence shows that it is the human elements of psychotherapy that are the most potent agents of healing

Reuters covers a new study in JAMA Psychiatry that suggests that children exposed to physical abuse and emotional abuse suffer from similar psychological and behavioral problems. “Even though doctors and parents often believe physical or sexual abuse is more harmful than emotional mistreatment or neglect, the study found children suffered similar problems regardless of the type of maltreatment endured.”

On November 4, the Health Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce (E&C) Committee marked up an amended version of the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act of 2015 (H.R. 2646), introduced by Rep. Tim Murphy (R-PA) and Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX). However, the bill still does not reflect the voices or meet the needs of millions of Americans with lived experience of mental health conditions because the E&C Health Subcommittee failed to incorporate our recommendations.

In July of 2014, I published an article explaining my concerns about the push to allow prescription privileges for psychologists across the country, after news of the recent legislation in Illinois sanctioning this practice.  I cited four main areas of concern, which I will revisit below.  More discussion is necessary regarding these issues if we as psychologists, and the general public, are going to be fully informed.

ServiceNet, a mental health and human service agency in western Massachusetts, received a three year, two million dollar grant to launch a program designed to support young adults who have recently experienced their first episode of psychosis. The Prevention and Recovery Early Psychosis (PREP) program is funded by the Massachusetts department of mental health and is designed to treat psychosis as a symptom, not an illness, resulting from other illnesses, substance abuse, trauma, or extreme stress.

A New York Times Op-Ed by Cornell psychiatry professor George Makari connects the surprise over the results of the widely-covered RAISE study to American psychiatry’s shift toward pharmacology and the oversimplification of disorders as brain diseases.

President Obama has made it a point of his administration to attempt to integrate the science of human behavior into smarter government policies. For example, understanding how we might act irrationally can inform policies about decisions made on the free market.

In the Boston Globe, Sarah Schweitzer tells the story of a young boy brutally abused by his parents then given to his grandparents who struggled with extreme poverty and homelessness. “Researchers now understood that trauma could alter the chemistry of developing brains and disrupt the systems that help a person handle stress, propelling a perpetual state of high alert. The consequences could be lifelong. As an adult, he’d be more likely to suffer anxiety and depression and heart disease and stroke. His ability to hold a job, manage money, and make good decisions could be compromised. And there was evidence, controversial but mounting, that he could pass on these traits to his children.”

Researchers recently completed a first of its kind, large-scale international survey of attitudes about mental health and they were surprised by the results. According to their analysis published in this month’s issue of the Journal of Affective Disorders, people in developed countries, like the United States, are more likely to assume that ‘mental illnesses’ are similar to physical illnesses and biological or genetic in origin, but they are also much less likely to think that individuals can overcome these challenges and recover

In the third major verdict of its kind, drug giant Johnson & Johnson was ordered to pay a Maryland man who grew female breasts while taking the antipsychotic Risperdal. The company failed to warn doctors, patients, and regulators of the risk of abnormal breast development in young males and now faces about 5,400 lawsuits involving the drug.

The Washington Examiner reports that the manufacturer of the antipsychotic Abilify is seeking FDA approval for new digitized pills that would alert doctors if patients fail to take their drugs on schedule.

Dennis Embry, a clinical psychologist and government consultant on mental health, shares a letter he sent to congressman Murphy warning him about how he may have been misled concerning his mental health bill. “I am specifically writing you about erroneous, false information you’ve been given about the National Registry of Evidence Base Programs and Practices. That erroneous information is likely to cause serious problems, which have been withheld from you.”

I felt a chill go through my body when I read that the FDA has agreed to review for possible approval in early 2016 a new form of the drug Abilify that contains a microchip sensor capable of sending a message that indicates the exact time a tablet dissolves in the stomach. The message is recorded by a skin patch - along with data such as the person’s body angle and activity patterns - and, according to a press release from Proteus Digital Health, the developer of the device, “this information is recorded and relayed to patients on a mobile phone or other Bluetooth-enabled device, and only with their consent, to their physician and/or their caregivers.”

In the Atlantic, Ed Yong reports that despite the lack of replicability of individual studies, when you get a pool of psychologists “betting on” the reproducibility of a study their predictions are surprisingly accurate. “Which makes me wonder: What's going on with peer review? If people know which results are really not likely to be real, why are they allowing them to be published?”

The University of Colorado has a long history of discrimination against people with lived experience of recovery from mental health labels. One Colorado advocate has made attempts for over 20 years to interact successfully with a faculty member who was a leader in the mental health community. Several of the CU faculty members are leaders in disease-mongering, or causing people to have false positive mental health diagnoses. This is what happens when clinical services are emphasized and recovery is unheard of.

Professor Wendy Rogers believes that overdiagnosis itself is an epidemic and that the roots of the problem lie in an insufficient naturalistic disease-theory. Overdiagnosis, she adds, “can be harmful for the patient and also cause waste of a lot of resources.”

In an interview with the New Scientist, former NIMH director Dr. Thomas Insel explained his decision to join Google and move to the private...