Around The Web

David Kupelian writes "Two-and-a-half years ago, a groundbreaking peer-reviewed study out of California-based Kaiser Permanente documented a significantly increased prevalence of children born with autism...

-The Wall Street Journal asks why some 274,000 infants and 370,000 toddlers in the US are taking antianxiety sedatives and antidepressant drugs.

-Are publicly funded research centers the answer to curbing corruption and bias in medical and psychiatric studies?

“Robert Califf's ties to Big Pharma run deep and the Obama nominee for the FDA just sailed through the U.S. Senate.” Article →

-A neuroscientist hopes to identify the exact place inside a brain where a particular memory is held.

-Mother Jones looks at drug company promotional efforts, expanded diagnostic criteria, and the appeal of amphetamines to high-performance cultures globally.

“Doctors say one of the best anti-depressants isn't even a drug, it's exercise,” CNN reports. “Experts say many cases of depression can be treated effectively with, for example, a pair of running shoes.”

A new study in JAMA reveals that, on average, 25% of beginning physicians meet the diagnostic criteria for major depression. In an accompanying editorial, Dr. Thomas Schwenk, added: "Everybody asks me, because of some of my prior studies, should we have more intense work in diagnosing depression in students? Of course, the answer is 'yes,' but how do you go about that without further stigmatizing them, further labeling them, further singling them out to even greater stigma? It's not just an issue of, 'Let's make better diagnoses and let's provide better treatment'; it’s more complicated than that."

"In a rare intervention, the government has asked Victoria's Chief Psychiatrist for a report on Garth Daniels, a patient diagnosed with schizophrenia, whose case...

"The study predicts that audits would reduce the number of false positive results from 30.2 per 100 papers to 12.3 per 100—far from perfect,...

-"What links polar explorer Ernest Shackleton, sleep paralysis, and hearing voices?" asks The Guardian.

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.”

Reuters covers a new study in JAMA Psychiatry that suggests that children exposed to physical abuse and emotional abuse suffer from similar psychological and behavioral problems. “Even though doctors and parents often believe physical or sexual abuse is more harmful than emotional mistreatment or neglect, the study found children suffered similar problems regardless of the type of maltreatment endured.”

The editors of Scientific American take on direct-to-consumer drug advertisements in the US. “Peddling pharmaceuticals on TV is a lousy form of health education,”...

Psychologist Jeff Rubin summarizes some of the latest scandals out of the pharmaceutical industry and asks, “what can be done?” Article →

-The findings of many neuroscientific studies are really just random background noise.

In The National Psychologist, forensic psychologist David Kirschner writes about his experiences evaluating young murderers, and discusses the negative role that he feels prior...

Gary Greenberg writes in the New Yorker about psychiatry's longstanding quest for scientific validity. Article →

Writing for Forbes, Matthew Herper documents the FDA’s increasing drug approval rates. “In 2008, BioMedTracker says the FDA approved 20 new molecular entities (NMEs) and rejected 20, for an approval rate of 50%.” So far this year, he writes, “the FDA approval rate is more like 96%.”

"ISIS provides existential fast food, and for some of the most spiritually hungry young Westerners, ISIS is like a Big Mac amidst a barren wasteland of an existence,” Omar Hague writes in the Psychiatric Times. “Who actually joins ISIS? Not psychopaths or the brainwashed, but rather everyday young people in social transition, on the margins of society, or amidst a crisis of identity.”

An article in Nature Reviews Neuroscience about low sample sizes suggests, according to The Guardian, that "the likelihood that any claimed effect (based on...

For STAT, Charles Piller covers new federal rules requiring stricter reporting for researchers conducting human studies. Previous investigations have documented widespread noncompliance with such...

Professor Mick Cooper from the University of Roehampton in London has been majority-funded by the Economic and Social Research Council to conduct and extensive...

1BoringOldMan compares major public events of psychiatry to the hype encountered at the Academy Awards: ". . . Festive, celebratory, celebrity, all designed to ...

The University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) has launched a peer research survey and is looking for participants. “We invite peer workers and certified...