Hospitalizing People for Mental Illness Can Be Worse Than Putting Them in Prison
-Chandra Bozelko has been involuntarily committed and imprisoned, and has strong opinions on which is more therapeutic.
“Redefining Mental Illness”
-Anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann reflects on the British Psychological Society's "Understanding Psychosis and Schizophrenia" document.
“The Whisper Whisperers”
-Newsweek visits the Hearing Voices Network.
“Randomized Controlled Trials in Environmental Health Research: Unethical or Underutilized?”
-Simon Fraser University health scientists argue that we need to start doing more randomized controlled trials to better understand the negative impacts of environmental pollutants on human bodies and brains.
“We Need Publicly Funded Research Centers”
-Are publicly funded research centers the answer to curbing corruption and bias in medical and psychiatric studies?
How Can Two Such Radically Different Experiences Both Be Called “Schizophrenia”?
-Psychiatrist Jose Andres Saez Fonseca disposes with the language of the diagnostic manuals, and tries to grapple with different ways of seeing.
Psychiatric Times Still Seeking Suggestions for Broken Mental Health System
-Psychiatric Times will continue its series of commentaries on how to fix the mental health system through 2015.
Harvard Psychiatrist Starts Believing Abducted Patients, and Other Top Posts
-Psychiatric Times' most popular posts of 2014.
“An Early Glimpse of Baby’s Developing Brain”
-What are scientists learning from brain scans of babies in the womb?
“When Medical Apps Do More Harm Than Good”
-The industry of mobile apps that diagnose users' physical and mental ailments is already worth some $4 billion.
“My Lovely Wife in the Psych Ward”
-An intimate personal story of a husband and wife struggling through psychological crises together.
What Caused the American Child Bipolar Epidemic?
-Psychiatrists analyze why US bipolar diagnoses in children and adolescents increased 40 times over in less than 10 years.
“Loony Radio” Broadcasts from Inside a Psychiatric Hospital
-A radio show from inside a Buenos Aires psychiatric hospital.
Madness Radio: “Special Messages”
On Madness Radio, Will Hall interviews psychotherapist and author Tim Dreby about his experiences with both external world and internal world encounters with secret...
“The Rise of the Medical Scribe Industry”
In JAMA, several Texas medical doctors and health information experts discuss the rapidly expanding number of "medical scribes" being hired by physicians to enter medical information into electronic health records (EHRs). Many doctors are finding electronic health records to be inefficient and unhelpful, they write, yet governments continue to mandate them.
Three Psychiatrists Attempt to Distinguish Grief, Complicated Grief and Depression
In Medscape, three psychiatrists discuss the new definitions in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders for grief, complicated grief, depression and major depression, and try to explain how to reliably distinguish between them all.
Sunday History Channel: Ivan Illich on Health
A 1995 issue of Aisling Magazine ran an essay by philosopher Ivan Illich that challenged our society's growing psychological dependence on the health care system. "(S)ome of us today have come to believe that we desperately need packages, commodities, all under the label of "health", all designed and delivered by a system of professionalised services," wrote Illich. "Some try to convince us that an infant is born, not only helpless needing the loving care of a household, but also sick requiring specialised treatment by self-certified experts."
“The Best Brain Pickings Articles of the Year”
Brain Pickings offers its list of its own best articles of 2014, including a discussion of Kierkegaard's 1847 treatise on bullying, a re-analysis of Virginia Woolf's suicide letter, and an exploration of "the art of living wide."
“Is being a worrier a sign of intelligence?”
The British Psychological Society's Research Digest examines a recent study that found that certain higher ratings of intelligence in people seemed to be correlated with higher ratings of anxiety and rumination as well.
Thoughts on Meditation and the Neurophysiology of Consciousness
In NPR's Cosmos & Culture blog, philosopher Alva Noë discusses how we see colors, and uses it as an introduction to the efforts of...
“Risks in Using Social Media to Spot Signs of Mental Distress”
In the New York Times, Natasha Singer discusses last year's launch by the Samaritans of an app that allowed people to track others' mental...
“Emerging Ideas in Brain Science”
In Metapsychology Online Reviews, Roy Sugarman discusses the latest Cerebrum Anthology, which examines "Emerging Ideas in Brain Science." The book, Sugarman writes, covers topics...
“The Medicalization of Mood: Worse Than Nothing, or Just Ineffective?”
In his blog Psychology Salon, psychologist Randy Paterson explores what the balance of evidence is showing us after 60 years of increasing medical treatments...
Why You Can Have a Tapeworm in Your Brain and Still Live Fairly Normally
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.
Providing Counseling After a Tragedy May Do More Harm than Good
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.
