Around The Web

An article for the Los Angeles Times, entitled “His 83-year-old Wife jumped to her death from a Kaiser clinic- why?” tells the story of Barbara Ragan who stepped off a roof in front of her mental health clinic with traces of Xanax, Prozac and an antidepressant in her blood.

A New York Times Sunday Review op-ed discusses the frustrations of the wealthy and powerful ruler Abd Al-Rahman III, an emir and caliph of...

Kathleen Flaherty argues that it is understandable why some people think involuntary outpatient commitment will improve Connecticut's mental health system, but the belief is misguided.

At CounterPunch, Joseph Natoli connects Big Pharma, mass shootings, and rampant inequality. He writes: “The Brave New World soma strategy to deal with a population that, were they not doped up, might violently disrupt that brave new world, is useful if a society is ‘creatively destroying’ a growing number of its population each day. While the poor have daily evidence of their poverty, a collapsing middle class live in the illusion that they are middle class and just a short distance, not from ruin, but from fame and fortune. They are, in short, heading for a catastrophic break-down. Big Pharma is already set to give us all a ‘soft landing.’”

Project Know, an addiction education website, has a graphical statistical analysis of mentions of different types of drugs in hip hop music from 1988...

-Is it reasonable to compare the roles American psychologists played in the CIA torture program to the roles that psychiatists played in Nazi Germany?

Former DSM-IV task force chair Allen Frances takes aim at the “massive overuse of psychotropic medication in children” in an article for the Psychiatric Times. He shares a checklist of questions for doctors to consider before prescribing medication to children. Frances warns: “We simply don’t know what will be the long-term impact of bathing a child’s immature brain with powerful chemicals.”

1BoringOldMan on Thomas Insel's utopian aspirations, that have "turned the NIMH into a National Institute of Neuroscience . . . So he’ll get proposals that...

-Only one person out of 661 in a psychological study said that he/she is more biased than the average person.

“While adolescents will take more risks in the presence of their peers than when alone, it turns out that peers can also encourage them...

-NIMH's Thomas Insel asks how internet-driven and crowd-sourced approaches could be applied to medical and psychiatric research.

-CBC Radio interviews UK neuropsychopharmacologist David Nutt, Mark Haden of MAPS, and historian Erika Dyck about the past and present politics and science of psychedelic research.

Allen Frances writes about Obama's $235 million investment in a new mental health system, in the Huffington Post; "Most of the kids singled out...

-People could be sentenced to two years in jail for publicly disclosing information about health and mental health conditions in Australian immigration detention centers.

Catherine Kerr of the Contemplative Studies Initiative provides a critique of positive findings in her own area of research. "Is the general public overvaluing...

-What evidence base is there to guide a patient switching from one type of psychotherapeutic treatment to another?

Writing on his critical psychiatry blog, Duncan Double critiques Joe Herbert’s piece on “Why can't we treat mental illness by fixing the brain?” in Aeon. While Herbert admits that there is a "mysterious and seemingly unfathomable gap" between psychology and neuroscience, which "bedevils not only psychiatry, but all attempts to understand the meaning of humanity,” he goes on to speculate that someday psychiatrists will be able to relate symptoms to brain activity.

Reuters reports that a new drug for major depression failed to improve symptoms in two late-stage clinical trials sending the manufacture’s stock into a...

Gary Greenberg gets a chance to engage with Thomas Insel and Jeffrey Lieberman on the risks and benefits associated with psychiatric diagnosis and the...

Australia's The Stringer continues to follow the thread of concerns related to ADHD medication; suicidality in children given the drugs, health risks including liver damage...

For NPR’s 13.7: Cosmos and Culture blog, philosopher Alva Noë comments on a new Oxford journal, Neuroscience of Consciousness. He is skeptical of the persistent tendency of some neuroscientists “to think of consciousness itself as a neural phenomenon.” His own view, he writes “is that the brain is only part of the story, and that we can only begin to understand how the brain makes us consciousness by realizing that brain functions only in the setting of our bodies and our broader environmental (including our social and cultural) situation.”

Dr. Peter Breggin blogs in the Huffington Post on the need for programs to support psychiatric drug withdrawal, rather than more diagnosis and medication. Article...

The Journal of Clinical Medicine explores pediatric bipolar disorder through the eyes  a young American, whose story "reveals several issues that afflict contemporary psychiatry, particularly in...

Just last week one person was declared brain dead and five more were hospitalized after taking a psychiatric drug in a clinical trial. Writing for Science, Martin Enserink provides more information about the drug as new details emerge.

-Mother Jones discusses evidence that solitary confinement may actually damage the brain.