Yearly Archives: 2015

In Metapsychology Online Reviews, Roy Sugarman discusses the latest Cerebrum Anthology, which examines "Emerging Ideas in Brain Science." The book, Sugarman writes, covers topics...

Systematic reviews of the medical literature may not be as reliable or helpful as often believed.

The distribution and demand for psychiatric drugs is at its highest level since their first introduction over 50 years ago. As part of our culture of addiction modern psychiatry, in collusion with the pharmaceutical industry, has greatly expanded and increased the demand for their own particular versions of legal and highly profitable mind altering substances. This demand has become so great that even if the current medical establishment wanted to reverse this trend (something that will never happen), they would now face tremendous outrage from a mass of desperate consumers.

In his blog Psychology Salon, psychologist Randy Paterson explores what the balance of evidence is showing us after 60 years of increasing medical treatments...

Mind Hacks looks at a number of unusual cases, such as a woman missing a cerebellum and a man who had a tapeworm eat its way through his brain over four years, and asks what these kinds of cases are telling us about what we do -- and don't -- know about the human brain.

By their own recent admissions, establishment psychiatrists and major psychiatry institutions have been repeatedly wrong about disorder validity, biochemical causes, and drug treatments; and also, in several cases, have been discovered to be on the take from drug companies—yet continue to be taken seriously by the mainstream media. While Big Pharma financial backing is one reason that psychiatry is able to retain its clout, this is not the only reason. More insidiously, psychiatry retains influence because of the needs of the larger power structure that rules us. And perhaps most troubling, psychiatry retains influence because of us—society’s increasing fears and its expanding needs for coercion.

Elderly people in Sweden are five times more likely to be taking antipsychotics if they have a diagnosis of dementia, according to research published in Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica. And among those people with dementia, the lower their education the higher the likelihood they’re taking antipsychotics.

In The Conversation, two psychologists discuss the research evidence into providing early intervention mental health services to the public shortly after large-scale tragedies. They advise that doing nothing is often much better and safer for people.

In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Helen Shen recounts the history of how neuroscientists first discovered that the human brain had right and left hemispheres with seemingly unique functions, and how that scientific view has since been superseded even as the general public has held on and oversimplified it.

Guilt, shame and anxiety appear in every known culture. Neither children nor adults seem to escape feeling some of these potentially disabling emotions and probably almost everyone has experienced all three. In my forensic experience, even the most hardened criminals who feel no guilt or shame about committing murder are nonetheless likely to feel guilty about something else, such as thinking or talking negatively about their father or mother. They surely feel shame, and overwhelming shame may have ended up fueling, rather than inhibiting, their murderous reactions. Meanwhile, it is highly unlikely that anyone, criminal or not, has avoided feeling anxiety.

In a 1992 essay, British psychiatric genetic researcher Michael Owen wondered whether schizophrenia molecular genetic research would become the “graveyard of molecular geneticists.”1 Owen predicted that if major schizophrenia genes existed, they would be found within five years of that date. He was optimistic, believing that “talk of graveyards is premature.”2 Owen now believes that genes for schizophrenia and other disorders have been found, and was subsequently knighted for his work. Despite massively improved technology, however, decades of molecular genetic gene finding attempts have failed to provide consistently replicated evidence of specific genes that play a role in causing the major psychiatric disorders.

Those of us who critique psychiatry were recently treated to an interesting phenomenon—the publicly available part of the January 2015 issue of Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, which contains multiple articles devoted to the question of psychiatry’s “poor image” — how to understand it, how to assess it, what to do about it. The release of this issue is hardly the first occasion where articles have appeared in which psychiatrists have speculated on outsiders’ negative image of the profession. Indeed, more and more, we are seeing such articles together with other evidence that the professionals are concerned. This article probes the collection in question for themes, positions, and framing.

In Counterpunch, Geoff Gray analyzes how increasing use of psychiatric drugs and declining financial support for psychology may have contributed to the American Psychological Association's reluctance to condemn involvement in US government torture programs, even in spite of protests from its own membership.

"I spent almost 20 years inside the inner sanctum of the American Psychological Association," writes Bryant Welch in The Huffington Post. "A psychologist and attorney, I was the first Executive Director of Professional Practice for the APA and in 1986 built much of the advocacy structure still in place to advocate for clinical psychologists." Welch offers his perspectives on how and why the APA started to support the US torture program after his departure.

More than half of the prescriptions for antipsychotic drugs in the UK are being issued "off-label" to treat conditions other than those for which the drugs are approved, according to a large study published in the British Medical Journal Open. Researchers also found significantly higher levels of prescribing of the medications to poorer people.

Mind Hacks discusses the first historical case of a celebrity (presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964) being "diagnosed" in the media by psychiatrists and...

Psychology Salon psychologist Randy Paterson discusses the Mad In America investigative report about a program that trains physicians and school staff to more readily diagnose mental illnesses in children. "Authors of the initiatives almost always talk about the enhancement of social supports, the provision of psychotherapy, involvement with community, and so on," writes Paterson. "But in the real world of medical practice, screening usually translates into prescriptions written."

Interviews in io9 with neuroscientists James Giordano of Georgetown University Medical Center and Jonathan Moreno from the University of Pennsylvania supplement a discussion of...

In Discover, Neuroskeptic adds his voice to a discussion about the BMJ Christmas issue and whether or not scientific studies that are intended to...

The International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry published an article titled Safety and utility of acute electroconvulsive therapy for agitation and aggression in dementia,  which concludes "Electroconvulsive therapy may be a safe treatment option to reduce symptoms of agitation and aggression in patients with dementia whose behaviors are refractory to medication management." But the participants were not a random selection of people taking the drugs in question. Rather, they were individuals selected because of aggressive behavior, most of whom had been taking some or all of these drugs on admission. So it is a distinct possibility that the aggression was a drug effect for many, or even most, of the study participants.

Early in December, HealthNewsReview.org announced receipt of a $1.3 million grant from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation to re-start and significantly expand its operations. And in late December Retraction Watch announced that it had received $400,000 from the MacArthur Foundation. Both websites specialize in monitoring and reporting on poor practices in science, medicine and psychiatry.

The Fix reviews the past and present of the estimated $2 billion/year industry of trying to "improve" the behaviors and attitudes of "troubled teens." Adolescence...

MIA Blogger Monica Cassani of Beyond Meds has posted the top 10 articles from her website in 2014, as well as a list of...

A news story and opinion article in Psychiatric News discuss a current US Supreme Court case that is considering whether non-dentists should be permitted...

It falls upon us survivors to prove that we were damaged, and that we aren’t malingerers or attention hounds or “mentally ill”— if we have any energy amidst the maelstrom to plead our case. Because if we don’t, we risk having our narratives rewritten by others’ “good intentions,” misinformed though they may be by the mainstream narrative. People get weird and pushy about this stuff, both because suffering is ugly and because our truth threatens their worldview.