Around The Web

Miriam Stoppard writes an opinion piece on the lack of good research on Ritalin, a drug often used for ADHD, and discusses the latest Cochrane review which found a high percentage of side-effects in children. Despite the lack of quality evidence, “NHS figures show that nearly one million ADHD prescriptions were handed out last year in England – a number that has more than doubled in 10 years.”

A New York Times piece by John Leland asks “Do you know what you want to do when you get old?” as it follows six New Yorkers over age 85 throughout the year. For them, “old age is a mixture of happiness and sadness, with less time wasted on anger and worry.”

In a Forgotten History article for the Daily Beast, Brandon Ambrosino tells the story of the 1972 meeting of the American Psychiatric Association. There,...

Martin Shkreli, the former hedge fund manager who became infamous for buying a life-saving drug and then raising the price significantly, was led away in handcuffs by the FBI last week. Unfortunately, the Boston Globe editorial board reminds us, “viewing his much-publicized takedown as anything like a tipping point in the push for pharmaceutical industry reform would be a mistake.”

PsyBlog presents research on the experience of awe. “That jaw-dropping moment when coming across something surprising, powerful, beautiful or even sublime can have a transformative effect, they find.”

Pro Publica and the NY Times collaborate on an investigative report revealing loopholes in HIPAA laws that allow providers to release the mental health...

“The paper, The  psychopathology of James Bond, and its implications for the revision of the DSM-007, has just won first prize in the Australian Medical Journal's...

The Washington Post reports on a new study in JAMA Psychiatry that shows that watching more than 3 hours of television a day in...

"To be sure, the FDA review process is not perfect. What is? But the agency is still considered the gold standard by which other...

“Can Santa blur the divide between fantasy and reality and, as a result, delay a child’s cognitive development?”

Rob Wipond takes HealthNewsReview.org to task for its coverage of a Philadelphia Inquirer article about a medical device designed for people experiencing panic. He writes that “hyperbolic psychiatric and psychological claims frequently get free passes from otherwise thoughtful medical critics.”

“In 2014, the number of people who died from drug overdoses in the United States reached 47,055 — an all-time high, according to a disturbing report published Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC),” but “the effort to get physicians to curb their prescribing of these drugs may be faltering amid stiff resistance from drugmakers, industry-funded groups and, now, even other public health officials.”

Philosopher Richard Kamber discusses what Dickens’ tale of Scrooge in A Christmas Carol can add to our discussions of free will in the present....

Boston College Psychologist Peter Gray writes for Aeon about the impact of the gradual erosion of children’s’ play in the United States. “Over the...

Star Wars taps into some fundamental facets of the human condition and tells mythic and religious stories, Professor Patti McCarthy explains for The Conversation....

“Throughout the world, we estimate that millions of people are prone to displaying Christmas spirit deficiencies after many years of celebrating Christmas,” write the...

"A STAT investigation finds that “Most research institutions — including leading universities and hospitals in addition to drug companies — routinely break a law that requires...

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.”

“A group of Boston doctors is proposing to join a study that would provide emergency treatment for brain-injured patients without obtaining the trauma victims’...

“Published in the journal PLoS ONE, a new set of studies suggests that compassion—and intentionally cultivating it through training—may lead us to do more to help the wronged than to punish the wrongdoer. Researchers found compassion may also impact the extent to which people punish the transgressor.”

“A new study is giving insight into how long-term care patients in the province are progressing — or, in some cases, worsening — over time. It found those living in central Newfoundland are more likely to be given antipsychotic drugs they don't need.”

For the Critical Psychiatry blog, Duncan Double writes that psychological formulation and psychosocial assessment may provide a way forward to a “new psychiatry” that moves on from modern concepts of mental illness as chemical imbalance or some other abnormality of the brain.

"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.”