Around The Web

Updates on critical psychiatry postings across the Internet.

Husband of UK Royal Took own Life After ‘Adverse Effects of Medication’

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From The Guardian: The son-in-law of Prince and Princess Michael of Kent killed himself after suffering adverse side-effects from antidepressants prescribed by a Buckingham Palace...

We Should #DropTheDisorder Because….

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Allies of adisorder4everyone.com share their reasons why we should "Drop the disorder!" in a promotional video for the AD4E annual online festival on Friday, November 8.

Will Denial Make DSM’s Validity Problem Go Away?

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The Psychiatric Times has been hosting a point/counterpoint regarding the validity of DSM diagnoses, which began when two Finnish researchers, Jussi Valtonen and Jani...

The Drug-based Approach to Mental Illness Has Failed

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Science writer John Horgan interviews Robert Whitaker about his book Anatomy of an Epidemic, the long-term impact of psychiatric drugs, and promising alternatives to...

Billions of Dollars Later, Neuroscientists Still Struggling to Address Mental Health Crisis

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From Vox: It’s possible that some of the best mental health care lies outside Western psychiatry altogether.

Scores of Papers by Top NIH Neuroscientist Eliezer Masliah Fall Under Suspicion

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From Science: The questionable data implicates many studies that underpin the development and testing of experimental Alzheimer's and Parkinson's drugs.

Capitalism Is Driven by Mental Illness

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Psychedelics are useful not for the hallucinations they provide, but for the hallucinations they dispel.

Involuntary Care Doesn’t Work. What BC Should Do Instead

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From The Tyee: An evidence-based approach clearly shows that the reliance on detention, force and coercion over the past two decades has not led to better outcomes.

Beyond Pharmacare

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From Briarpatch Magazine: Prisoner advocates and family members of institutionalized people depict the overprescribing epidemic as attempts to “control behaviour” turning people into “zombies.”

The U.S. Disconnecting & Numbing Epidemic: The Culprit and Our Options

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From CounterPunch: We are increasingly being forced to become machine components alienated from our humanity so as to fit into a large machine.

Targeted: For Those Who Hear Voices, the ‘Broken Brain’ Explanation Is Harmful

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From Aeon: If psychiatry’s medical vision is failing, what should we replace it with? How can we break out of this bind?

Descriptive Labels Are Not Causes, No Matter How Hard You Try: A Response to...

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From Psychiatric Times: If circular claims are presented together with unfounded claims about purported brain mechanisms, they may further bias people towards falsely assuming that biological causes and mechanisms have been identified for psychiatric problems.

Psychiatric Diagnoses Don’t Explain ‘Why’—Only ‘How’

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From Psychology Today/Denise Winn: Finnish researchers found that the most influential health organizations "used language that inaccurately described depression as a causal explanation to depressive symptoms."

Microbes and Mental Illness

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Monica Cassani, in her Beyond Meds blog, explores the "infection connection" between Lyme disease and tardive dyskinesia. She references a pubmed article on this...

Neoliberalism and the Global Export of Psychiatry: Interview with Justin Karter

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From Depth Work: A Holistic Mental Health Podcast: Neoliberal values have led to a great deal of institutional corruption and also have been exported beyond the Western world across the globe.

In Defense of the Long, Painful Grind of Therapy

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From GQ: It is difficult to calculate, though easy to imagine, the uplift it could have on society if more people had a chance to work seriously on their mental wellbeing.

Tuskegee Syphilis Study Whistleblower Peter Buxtun Has Died at Age 86

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From AP: Buxtun is revered as a hero to public health scholars and ethicists for his role in bringing to light the most notorious medical research scandal in U.S. history.

Mount Sinai Aggressively Sought to Stifle Debate Over Its Controversial Brain Research

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From STAT: Leading neurologist Michael Okun at the University of Florida Health said the revelations about Mount Sinai's brain research should “set off the alarm bells."

Nearly a Third of Adolescents Getting Mental Health Treatment, Federal Survey Finds

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From CBS News: This works out to around 8.3 million young people between the ages of 12 and 17 getting counseling, medication or another treatment.

Overcoming Stigma as an Academic With ‘Schizophrenia’

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From PublicSource: My success stands in contrast to the hundreds or thousands of brilliant individuals with significant disabilities who have been locked out of academia for all the wrong reasons.

Medication Overuse in Mental Health Facilities: Not the Answer, Regardless of Consent

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From Medscape: Consent, while I support it, is not the solution to what is fundamentally an infrastructure problem, a personnel problem, and lousy long-term mental health care.

The FDA Just Quietly Gutted Protections for Human Subjects in Research

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From Newsweek: The new FDA rule gives thousands of IRB committees the unilateral ability to determine that researchers need not obtain true informed consent from research participants.

Why Your Brain Needs Other People

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From The Guardian: Developmental psychology has long recognised the social element in thinking. The emergence of individual thought can be understood as the internalisation of interpersonal dialogue, as the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky observed almost a hundred years ago.

Ghosts in the Machine: The Fantasies of Psychopharmacology | David Healy

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From David Healy/RxISK: This lecture outlines a radical new view about what antidepressants do and don't do. It covers issues that need input from everyone on how best to move forward with these treatments.

Landmark Win for Patient Autonomy in CA Supreme Court ECT Device Ruling

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From Wisner Baum: The Court rejected the argument by Somatics LLC that it should be immune from liability because the plaintiff’s doctor would have prescribed ECT anyway, even with a warning of the risk of brain damage.