Blogs

There I was on my first night of Outward Bound, lying under the big Texas sky in a little town called Redford, amidst waxy...

In the past 15 years, the NIMH has funded a number of major, multicenter trials of drug treatments for mental disorders in adults and...

By January of my junior year in college, I had reached my first true emotional bottom. Though surrounded by people on a daily basis...

On September 18, 2010, Mark Foster, a family physician in Littleton, Colorado, began his “Letters From the Front Lines” blog for this website. In...

Frantic, fearful, and desperate to get my life together, I returned to Cambridge in the middle of August to move into my off-campus apartment....

For some time now, the medical community—and to a certain extent, the general public—has understood that the reports in the medical literature of industry-funded...

Bob-- I have found that many patients, and even many physicians, don't appreciate the basic differences between psychology and psychiatry. For most of your readers,...

Investigative Reporters and Editors recently named Anatomy of an Epidemic as the winner of its 2010 best “investigative journalism” award in the books category. Here...

Upon arriving home at the end of sophomore year in college, which had been devoted to hyper-control and a carefully maintained, entirely black-and-white existence,...

Dear Bob-- I want to share an email I received from a physician friend, who practices in a hospital-based specialty. He is highly intelligent, naturally...

Subtly and insidiously, my medications, once merely inert composites of chemicals, acquired an agency of their own and took center stage in my life...

In my five plus years investigating STAR*D, I have identified one scientific error after another. Each error I found reinforced my search for more...

Yesterday, I have to confess, I experienced one of the more satisfying days of my journalistic career. Every journalist hopes that his or her...

Dear Bob-- Since you posted about my termination last week, I've received a lot of words of support and encouragement, and I wanted to say...

The 35-million-dollar Sequenced Treatment Alternatives to Relieve Depression (STAR*D) study is the largest antidepressant effectiveness study ever conducted. STAR*D enrolled 4,041 depressed patients and...

Bob-- I want to share with you a success story that has played out over the last three months. I have been working with a woman...

Bob-- I want to share with you a success story that has played out over the last three months. I have been working with a woman...

At no moment in my childhood-- whether in those weekday hours after school spent exploring the woods with my dog, or on the early...

Bob-- I'm going to share with you a case from today that did not involve psychotropics, but I think it illustrates an important point about...

A newfound acceptance of my bipolar diagnosis during the winter of my freshman year at Harvard filled me to the brim with a sense...

Bob-- Recently, I saw a thirty-six year-old Bulgarian man for a follow-up visit. He is my age, with three children almost exactly the same ages...

In 1991, Nancy Andreasen began a long-running study of first-episode schizophrenia patients, which involved periodically measuring their brain volumes with magnetic resonance scans. In...

On the day I arrived as a freshman at Harvard in the fall of 2001, I dropped my belongings in my dorm room, said...

Bob-- Today, I saw an intelligent and sarcastic teenage boy for renewal of his Adderall. He presented with his well-meaning but frustrated father, who is...

As many readers of this blog may know, I spoke at the psychiatric department’s Grand Rounds at Massachusetts General Hospital on January 13, which...