Around The Web

In this piece for The Atlantic, Chris Millard discusses how increased medical, psychiatric, and psychoanalytic scrutiny of motherhood in the 20th century set the stage...

From the New York Times Book Review: In 1975, two English biologists, Robin Holliday and John Pugh, and an American biologist, Arthur Riggs, independently suggested...

In this piece for Aeon, Serife Tekin argues that contrary to antirealist perspectives emphasizing the illusion of selfhood, there is such a thing as the...

From The Guardian: Black and minority ethnic people are more likely to develop mental health conditions but less likely to access counselling – or find it fit for purpose.

Pediatrician Claudia Gold writes "The economic reality of primary care practice, due in large part to the administrative costs of managing a huge array...

William A. Wilson presents shocking evidence that a lot of published research is false and that science’s self-correcting mechanisms are broken. “There is no...

Reuters reports that GlaxoSmithKline has been fined $54.4 million by the UK for “market abuse in striking deals to delay the launch of cheap...

From The Washington Post: Feeling socially isolated triggers a fight-or-flight response, just as it would have in our ancestors, for whom being alone could mean being a saber-toothed tiger’s lunch.

Christian Perring of the invaluable Metapsychology Online reviews "Saving Normal: An Insider's Revolt Against Out-of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of...

-Neuroskeptic discusses two 20th century American surgeon-psychiatrists who believed that they could cure schizophrenia by removing parts of their patients’ intestines.

From STAT: Sexuality can be understood through the 'dancing model.' Dancing, like sex, requires having a body, but no one would study the art of ballet by cracking open Gray’s Anatomy.

"It is unacceptable for this municipality to create a housing crisis and then reframe it as a mental health crisis," writes the Vancouver Area...

In The Lancet, psychiatrist and MIA Blogger Andrew Scull discusses the themes in his book Madness In Civilization. "Mental illness haunts the human imagination,"...

The UK Independent reports that Ireland is moving toward a policy of decriminalizing small amount of drugs like heroin, cocaine, and cannabis in what amounts to a “radical cultural shift.” While it would remain a crime to profit from the sale of these substances, users will have specially designated areas for safe use. The chief of Ireland’s National Drugs Strategy told the paper: “I am firmly of the view that there needs to be a cultural shift in how we regard substance misuse if we are to break this cycle and make a serious attempt to tackle drug and alcohol addiction.”

Roger Colvin, PhD, considers the problem of withdrawal from antidepressants for the Huffington Post. Article →

From The Atlantic: In the mid- to late 1800s, psychiatric institutions were used to oppress women and reinforce patriarchal norms. The new Netflix show Alias Grace, based...

From WFAA: Many patients who check themselves into psychiatric hospitals voluntarily may have difficulty when attempting to check out. In one recent incident in Denton,...

The Intercept reports that the pharmaceutical companies that manufacture and market opioid painkillers have funded a number of groups designed to fight prescription drug reform.

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.

For Pharmalot, Ed Silverman reports on a recent study suggesting that people do not pay attention to the risk information on prescription drugs. Article →...

Glen Spielmans, an associate professor of psychology, reviews the controversy over Robert Gibbons' studies which challenged the view that antidepressants are ineffective and cause...

The International Business Times covers a new study showing “trials for new antidepressant medications may not be applicable to the population at large.” “The finding, published in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings, shows recent trials are less generalizable than the prior studies, as researchers excluded most depressed patients from drug company-sponsored treatment studies.”

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.”

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

An Op-Ed in Op-Ed News discusses the disconnect between concern about rising suicide rates in the general population (and the military) and awareness of...