Blogs

On the evidence base for textbooks' statements of the imbalance of neurotransmitters causing psychiatric disorders.

Lucy Johnstone from the British Psychological Society on the influential BBC radio news programme, Today (13th May 2013), a great room 101 on changing...

There is a large-scale failure to appreciate the risks involved in taking drugs that alter brain function on a long-term basis. The fact that it has taken single-minded and dedicated campaigners, many of them users of the drugs concerned, to bring these effects to the attention of the scientific and professional community is shameful.

A lengthy NYT op-ed had offered what I considered to be a fairly insane solution: “an old anesthetic called ketamine that, at low doses, can halt suicidal thoughts almost immediately.” Despite recognizing how much power the psychiatric-pharmaceutical industrial complex has over the NYT, I submitted my own op-ed in response.

The invitation from the London Review of Books to review Ben Goldacre’s Bad Pharma™ reads: “We were unsure, at first, what a review could add that isn’t already in the book – scrappy summaries and bits of praise are not for us. The book is of sufficient importance that the main thing is to get someone who knows what they’re talking about to present the material confidently... frame the discussion”. My head said it was inconceivable that the LRB wouldn’t take a review, even if it was at odds with the invitation to praise Bad Pharma. But my gut told me the inconceivable was about to take flesh.

There are terms in psychiatry that are designed to portray violent and distressing events as benign, and normal human rights, feelings and behaviours as threatening – things I think we need to name for what they are. The term ‘antidepressant’, for instance, shapes the way we think of these drugs. It renders the fact that they can worsen depression and cause suicidal thinking and behavior counter-intuitive, and makes people skeptical of claims they don’t work and make distressed people feel worse.

When the idea that selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRIs) might make people feel suicidal first started to be discussed, I admit I was sceptical. It didn’t seem to me the drugs had much effect at all, and I couldn’t understand how a chemical substance could produce a specific thought. Because these effects did not show up in randomised controlled trials, they were dismissed and few efforts were made to study them properly. Then some large meta-analyses started to find an association between the use of modern antidepressants and suicidal thoughts and actions, especially in children.

The “genetics of mental disorders” story told in Kolker's "Hidden Valley Road" involves omission and misrepresentation of genetic research.

Evolutionary psychiatry and breakthroughs in neuroscience are rapidly blurring the lines between adaptive and maladaptive changes. What would be possible if we put our attention on, gave money and resources to mental wellness instead of mental illness? The re-election of President Obama provides another opportunity for us to create a future for ourselves and our children that we could be proud to leave as a legacy, especially as it relates to how mental health is defined and considered in the body politic and media. Imagine mental wellness. Together, we can!

I imagine if I were to get a lot of presents, I might want to return some of the stuff I'd received. Similarly, I like to return stuff of any kind that feels excessive or like it isn't useful to me, or isn't mine to have. I once had a unique experience with a young acupuncturist/Chinese medicine doctor in training. He asked me a question that in my 31 years no doctor had ever asked me before. Yet it was a simple question. “What do you think your health issues are about?” It instantly shook me out of my habitual thinking and “role” as a patient. In a sense he was “returning me my stuff.”

In 2009, my friend Leonie’s 22-year-old son Shane killed himself and another young man after taking Citalopram for 17 days. Eighteen days after Shane’s death, Psychiatrist Dr Michael Corry publicly stated his view that he could not have done what he did had he not been on Citalopram. Initially Leonie admits to thinking he was mad. How could medicine prescribed by a doctor have anything to do with what had happened to her son?

BBC 5 live ran a recent piece that aimed to explore why antidepressant prescriptions have doubled in the last ten years. Unfortunately, it failed to address the drivers of this epidemic – industry-backed diagnostic inflation and the lax regulation of medicines.

I know that this might sound odd coming from a critical psychiatrist, but I believe that psychiatry has a future. Furthermore, I maintain that a good deal of psychiatry as practised now is helpful and that many psychiatrists manage to play a positive and therapeutic role in the lives of their patients. However, I also believe that we are at our most helpful when we depart from the current biomedical ideology that has come to dominate in our profession. As a first step, we need to get beyond the reductionism that currently guides most psychiatric research and education.

We are constantly hearing that ‘how we eat’ affects our health. The vast majority of studies showing the associations between diet and mental health have emerged in only the last decade, at best. So any professional who graduated over 10 years ago could potentially be completely unfamiliar with this body of research. We are encouraged by the number of professionals starting to pay attention to diet, but we have a long way to go.

Psychologist Jim Probert of the University of Florida's student counseling center explains why "Our goal is not to take the steering wheel out of the person's hands."

Despite noting financial problems, global conflict, and climate crisis, the report was on how individuals could work on their own stress.

NISAPI helps people achieve recovery by pairing the normalcy of a ranch and the nurturance of horses with a philosophy of postmodern collaborative practice.

(August, 1985) My first academic article, entitled, “Dissociation and Psychotic Symptoms” is published in The American Journal of Psychiatry. It was a case report of a young girl who experienced visions and voices. We thought that she had dissociative symptoms and we had taught her how to control these experiences through self hypnosis. In the same month, an article was published in another academic journal. This was entitled, “Treatment of Bulimia and Rapid-Cycling Bipolar Disorder with Sodium Valproate: A case Report .” We were describing the same young girl. Our treatments were concurrent. How could this be?

Dear Bob: Today, fittingly, was a very psych heavy day at my clinic. I saw the whole gamut of patient situations, patients (and their conflicted...

“The word is out!” That was Dr. Keris Myrick’s reaction when she was elected earlier this month as the new president of NAMI’s Board...

I believe the emotions of guilt and shame are culturally induced negative emotional experiences that almost all of us are tragically made to feel from infancy or childhood on. But guilt and shame are not now, nor ever were, hard-wired human emotional necessities.

When plastic surgery goes awry, doctors defend themselves by labeling the harmed patient with mental illness.

Mad in America is about to turn eight years old, and as we are launching a fundraising effort to keep us going through 2020, I think it’s appropriate to ask the relevant question: Are we accomplishing what we set out to do?

As a psychiatrist and psychedelic researcher in Melbourne, I’ve reached the conclusion that we are in for a wild ride with psychedelics over the next few years.

People in roles of power in the mental health system often don’t realize how much complicity they have in actually creating the symptoms they claim are biologically-based in individuals with psychiatric labels.