The STAR*D Scandal: A New Paper Sums It All Up
The story of how the STAR*D results were misreported has been coming together for some time now, step by step, and a paper recently...
Charlie Rose and the Mentally Ill Brain
On a recent PBS television show hosted by Charlie Rose on the "mentally ill brain," Columbia University's Jeffrey Lieberman presented a series of brain...
News Roundup From June
There are a number of bloggers that regularly send out news of the latest findings reported in psychiatric journals and other media, and I...
”Broken Brains” and “Beautiful Minds”
When I first interviewed Brandon Banks, in the spring of 2008, while researching Anatomy of an Epidemic, he had recently entered Elizabethtown Community College...
Medicating Children: A “Whistleblower’s Lawsuit” Raises a Novel Legal Question
In the past few years, a number of pharmaceutical companies have admitted to federal charges that they illegally marketed psychiatric medications for non-approved uses,...
Yet Another Disappointment: First Catie, and Now the 12-Month Results from TEOSS
The NIMH's CATIE trial of antipsychotics for adult schizophrenia is regularly understood to have shown that atypical antipsychotics are "no better" than the old...
Update on the Star*D Report
Two months ago, I wrote a post about a New Yorker article that reported that 67% of the depressed patients in the STAR*D trial...
A Schizophrenia Mystery Solved?
One of the enduring mysteries in schizophrenia research circles has been the disparity in outcomes between schizophrenia patients in "developing countries" and those in...
Time Magazine and Anatomy of an Epidemic
As I expected, Anatomy of an Epidemic is turning out to be a controversial book. A nice review in New Scientist magazine, a thrashing...
Hypotheses, Scientific Evidence, and On Being Compared to an AIDS Denier
In today’s Boston Globe (April 14), Dr. Dennis Rosen, a pediatric lung and sleep specialist at Children’s Hospital in Boston, reviews my new book,...
Story-Telling in the Age of Corporate Medicine (or more on being called an AIDS...
As a journalist, I long have been fascinated by reporting on the storytelling forces within American medicine that create societal understanding of the merits...
Fact Checking the New Yorker, Part Two
In his March 1 article in the New Yorker, Louis Menand wrote that the NIMH's STAR*D trial showed that antidepressants produced a 67% recovery...
Fact Checking the New Yorker
In the March 1 issue of the New Yorker, Louis Menand surveyed the topsy-turvy world of treatments for depression, writing in part of the...
