Adverse Effects

Researcher Zel Dolinsky once taught at medical school and worked as a medical writer in the pharmaceutical industry. In his last emails, he told of how the adverse effects of psychiatric drugs led him to choose to end his life.

From Yahoo! News: Nine months ago, Matt Amsler, a 24-year-old father, mysteriously disappeared after undergoing a bad reaction to antipsychotics. His body has been found...

Individuals diagnosed with a psychotic disorder are 4-6 times more likely than the general population to experience victimization.

From Persistent Market Research: The global antipsychotics market is expected to grow significantly by 2021, with especially high growth rates in Europe and Asia. However,...

I have almost four months to go until I am done with the little pills. After that, I’m told it will take two to nine months until my brain will regulate, until I will be able to eat normally, to stand without shivering, to hold my children without fear of falling. I will make it. But I am here to state the obvious: Benzodiazepines are dangerous. We need more research. We need to know that an invisible epidemic is in our midst and there is much that can be done.

From The Cook County Record: The trial of Dolin v. GlaxoSmithKline over the alleged paroxetine-induced suicide of Stewart Dolin began on March 14th. The trial is...

Nora Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), authored an editorial for BMJ this month warning that the opioid abuse epidemic could have dangerous consequences for pregnant women. While the effects of opioid exposure on the developing brain are yet unknown, research suggests that infants may suffer from withdrawal syndrome, nervous system defects, and impaired attachment with the mother.

There were some differences between the study, the abstract, the press release and the media coverage about the risks of taking antipsychotics during pregnancy.

In the context of the Silicon Valley suicides, one mother offers her story about her daughter. “It’s my premise that not only the culture of Silicon Valley, but also, almost more importantly, the nature of the remedies that are being proposed in the name of mental health counseling, are to blame in these deaths.”

I remember looking out of my living room window, drawing on my connection to all the women in the world who had felt this energy before, all that were in that moment, and all that would in time to come. This energy, this incredible power, was like a wave that I was riding for a brief window of my life, and sharing with my baby to move us through time into a new type of union. To me, this wasn’t anything to resist, to be afraid of, or to suppress. All I had to do was be there to witness, and keep my mind from getting in the way.

-Peter Hitchens argues that the public discussion about the Germanwings crash has to start distinguishing between whether depressed people should be flying and whether people taking antidepressants should be.

Long-term treatment with antipsychotic drugs is currently considered the standard treatment for patients diagnosed with ‘schizophrenia.’ A new study challenges this practice, however. The...

The most important data in an RCT is not whether the drug provides a statistically significant benefit over placebo. The most important data is the “number needed to treat” calculation (NNT). For the person considering taking an antidepressant or an antipsychotic, the NNT data provides the “math” needed to weigh the potential benefit of taking the drug against the potential harm of doing so.

A team of psychiatrists reviewed 654 cases in West Ireland to find that nearly 1% of all patients taking the antipsychotic clozapine had experienced clozapine-induced stuttering.

The results of the cross-sectional study show that U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) owned hospitals perform worst on most measures.

The FDA released a report in July of a trial on children and adolescents of the selegiline (Emsam) transdermal patch for treatment of depression,...

From HealthNewsReview: NPR recently reported on a study claiming that a test of just six simple questions can reliably diagnose adults with ADHD. Unknown to...

From ProPublica: Many physicians continue to administer treatments that have long been proven ineffective and even harmful to patients. "For all the truly wondrous developments of modern medicine...

The US Food and Drug Administration is still unsure whether a long-acting, injectable antipsychotic killed two people days after they received it.

US Congressman David Jolly has introduced a bill calling for studies on the link between veteran suicides and psychiatric drugs. The International Society for...

Adhering to a commonly prescribed medication for ADHD in children is associated with higher chances of being prescribed antidepressants in adolescence.

Laura McClure for Ted.com explains why giving amphetamines to children for behaviors deemed abnormal is a societal and public policy issue. “It’s a little...

A few weeks ago I saw for the first time the powerful movie “12 Years A Slave,” based on the memoir by Solomon Northup, a free black man in the 1840’s who was kidnapped and sold into slavery. It is a hard film to experience. But as I watched the scenes of unending brutality and humiliation, somehow I felt calm and almost comforted. I identified with the men and women who were treated as animals and property, to be abused and tortured just as I was as a child. But I knew that eventually the atrocity in the movie ended, and slavery was abolished.

The official voice of the American Psychiatric Association covers the short and long term side-effects of antipsychotics and promotes the use of therapeutic alternatives...

The paradox of relieving chronic pain with an antidepressant (and a new set of symptoms).