Yearly Archives: 2015

This is a very important, well-written book which should become essential reading for anyone involved in the healing arts, since suffering is - or should be - at the heart of our endeavors. Suffering tells us what’s really important to us, and our approach to it tells us what we’re really made of.

"What was going on inside Turning Point was an experiment: a community-based treatment center designed to serve low-income African-Americans. After a few bumpy early...

“We Americans are living through a dread-inducing age,” Jessica Stern writes in the ‘Times, and our feelings of vulnerability have psychological and political consequences. Terror Management Theory, “which suggests that much of human behavior is motivated by an unconscious terror of death,” provides an explanation for the xenophobia and culture wars that often follow the dread of an attack.

In a guest blog for the Scientific American, Eleonore Pauwels and Jim Drawta write about the “dark side of the data revolution —the successor to the Industrial Revolution, with personal data as the new coal, oil or shale gas to be extracted or traded away, enshrined in an updated Faustian pact.”

What does the psychology of terror mean for America’s future? Social psychologist Daniel Kort weighs in on what the science of terror management theory, behavioral economics, and political polarization can tell us about where we’re headed.

“Therapists and other people who help victims of trauma can become traumatized themselves.” Aaron Reuben writes in The Atlantic. “Hearing stories of suffering, in other words, can generate more suffering.”

"The holiday season can be a very stressful time, so think about giving directions, asking someone if they need help, or holding that elevator...

“Offenders sentenced to forensic psychiatric care do not consider their mental illness to be the main reason for their crime. Instead, they point to abuse, poverty or anger toward a particular person.”

In a series of experiments in mice, researchers found that the drug risperidone alters gut microbes, which in turn profoundly influence metabolism, weight, and overall health.

"Every year since 2006 in the U.S., the amount of new medical research in humans that’s funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has gone down, while the number of industry-funded trials has gone up, a new study shows.”

Renee M. is a 22-year-old UNCG graduate in Special Education. Falsely diagnosed with ADHD at the age of 19, Renee examines what happened to cause...

Renee M. is a 22-year-old UNCG graduate in Special Education. Falsely diagnosed with ADHD at the age of 19, Renee examines what happened to cause...

I came up with a tie for my "Enough is Enough" series, so I will address two articles. “Researchers identify key biological markers for psychotic disorders,” in Medical Xpress. The whole enterprise is a house of cards built on the ‘belief’ in a group of medical brain diseases, for which we haven’t found the specific proof yet. 'We are on the verge,' psychiatry says, so the belief is close enough. And if you repeat a belief often enough, it is taken as true. This is what has happened. There is no real science behind it, and at some point in the process a mistaken belief transforms into a lie.

Hugh Middleton, MD, Associate Professor at the School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Nottingham, and NHS Consultant Psychiatrist, Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust has written an interesting and worthwhile book, “Psychiatry Reconsidered, From Medical Treatment to Supportive Understanding.” Dr. Middleton is co-founder of the Critical Psychiatry Network and this book could serve as the foundational textbook for our field. As his academic appointment would suggest, he has a decidedly social perspective on the kinds of problems that bring many people to a psychiatrist’s attention, but in this book he offers eloquent discussions of many perspectives that inform our field. It is remarkable that in this 200 page text, he is able to cover so many topics – diagnosis, pharmacotherapy, schools of psychotherapy - with such clarity.

In Scientific American, Kasley Killam presents insights from research on “post-traumatic growth,” highlighting the importance of finding meaning or underlying significance in our struggles and misery. “The psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote extensively about this process after observing that his fellow inmates in concentration camps were more likely to survive the horrific conditions if they held on to a sense of meaning.”

Sociologist Garry Gray examines the institutional pressures and systemic failings that allow unsafe drugs to hit the market. “Research integrity and the institutional structures that support scientific research are key to understanding and eliminating scientific compromises. Without this understanding, we can’t truly progress beyond the 'Grünenthal science' that underscored the thalidomide tragedy.”

The Daily Telegraph reports on a warning published in the Medical Journal of Australia that urges doctors not to “jump the gun in prescribing patients the drug ketamine to treat depression.”

An analysis of medical records in the UK reveals that the use of certain antidepressants for depression is linked to a heightened risk for mania and bipolar disorder. The research, published this week in BMJ Open, found the strongest effect for serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and the antidepressant venlafaxine.

A little background for MIA readers on the recently published Huffington Post review about the documentary Healing Voices (see below), which I got published so as to help get the film gain publicity and screenings. I’ve been a Huffington Post blogger since 2007, but I’ve routinely had pieces that run counter to the psychiatry establishment censored. The current review was published within a few hours of my submitting it, and I can only speculate as to why. Perhaps it has to do with what department I submitted it to (which may have permitted it to avoid the Huffington Post medical review board); perhaps it was the references to the mainstream TED and the NIMH; or perhaps our movement is making so much progress that the Huffington Post is less reluctant to shut me up on pieces like this.

A new study demonstrates that the practice of mindfulness may ease pain in a way that is mechanistically distinct from the placebo effect. Research, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, found that mindfulness meditation not only outperformed placebo and fake meditation for pain relief but that it also activated different brain regions than the placebo treatments.

A former pharma executive has broken ranks with the industry in a new book by reporting how multiple psychiatrists, schools, and his desperate hopes pressed him to allow higher and higher doses of antipsychotic medications. The result: his 15-year-old son's death from Seroquel.

In “When Phrenology Was Used in Court,” Geoffrey S. Holtzman writes for Slate about the spurious use of brain science in legal cases. In the 1800’s the “science of phrenology” promised to reveal criminal psychological traits by measuring the skull and today defense teams still employ neurogenetic explanations for their client’s violent behavior.

Critical psychiatry researcher, anthropologist and NYU professor Helena Hansen writes: “Opioid maintenance acts as a kind of pharmaceutical prosthesis which promises to return white ‘addicts’ to regaining their status as full human persons and middle-class consumers. Meanwhile, black and brown users are not deemed as persons to be rescued, but rather dangerous subjects to be pharmaceutically contained within the public discipline of the state.”

Several of us involved in RxISK.org monitor other groups setting up to offer information on medicines. Some of these, like eHealthMe, offer useful information. As ever, though, pharmaceutical companies are in there early. The Brintellix website is a masterclass in how to appear patient-centered, and patient-friendly. How to move with the times and make the new way of doing things yours.

In New Zealand, the government is passing legislation called the Natural Health and Supplementary Products Bill that will limit access to minerals and vitamins. While safety and efficacy are important, this Bill will ban for sale many NHPs that New Zealanders rely on for their health. In so doing, it will ban all of the formulas for which there is scientific evidence of benefit for mental health. We have some evidence that the result could be tragic.