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Dreaming problem-solves various waking concerns creatively through memory consolidation and emotional processing.

On Tuesday, the New York Times reported on how SmithKline Beecham paid a marketing company, Scientific Therapeutics Information (STI), to ghostwrite a medical textbook...

The World Health Organisation was established in 1945 to provide leadership on global health matters. According to its Director General Dr Margaret Chan, it...

The simple act of defining doctors or patients concerned about adverse events as “critics” is a rhetorical stroke that marginalizes concerns – makes you a one-percenter rather than one of the ninety-nine percent. The pharmaceutical market is the least free market on earth.

Through the act of deep listening to personal stories of distress and healing, I have become convinced that even the most well-meaning mental health professionals are persistently asking the wrong questions. We are operating within a system that prizes the stability, conformity, and sedation of persons with experiences too unusual or too "disruptive" to social norms. It is a system that asks the question, "What is wrong with you?" and it is a system that defines "fixing" the problem as managing symptoms so that people aren't a bother (financially, logistically, and socially) to other people.

It’s been the kind of contemplative, hibernating winter that’s left us ready for an action-packed spring. Jacks and I spent two months living in a little house in the woods finishing our first solo books and revising the classic Icarus text Navigating the Space Between Brilliance and Madness...

May 8^th in the USA Today:   “WASHINGTON (AP) — Wrigley says it is taking a new caffeinated gum off the market temporarily as the Food and Drug Administration investigates the safety of added caffeine.”  Really?  Major Tranquilizers, Amphetamines, Benzodiazepines, and Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors have all been approved by the FDA for the treatment of “mental illness.” These drugs are being prescribed to youth, some as young as 3 and 4 years of age. My Big League Chew is more dangerous than Uncle Jim’s Seroquel or my big brother’s Adderall?

There are a number of bloggers that regularly send out news of the latest findings reported in psychiatric journals and other media, and I...

Bob-- My brain is still buzzing from my second day back in the trenches. My final patient today was a middle-aged woman who...

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

Congress is moving quickly to pass a bill that would authorize higher industry fees for the FDA in exchange for speeding up the approval...

I think it is time to reclaim the word disability. Disability needs to be appreciated. To the extent we value community over isolation, anything anyone cannot do, or needs help with, builds community. There are infinite examples in every career and walk of life of how necessary “disability” (since we're calling it that) is for connection, service and meaning in life. Without it we'd have absolutely no need for each other. And the fastest way to despair is to feel unnecessary.

There is a fascinating process playing out in academic medicine right now. The general public is understandably concerned that much of the medical literature...

As both a pediatrician and psychoanalyst, D.W. Winnicott had a unique view of human development. In preparation for teaching a course on early childhood mental health I had the pleasure of reconnecting with the profound wisdom of his writings. While Winnicott wrote extensively for both a general and a professional audience, I discovered, on careful re-reading of his essay for a general audience entitled ""The Ordinary Devoted Mother"" that it contains a vast wealth of ideas, foreshadowing contemporary research at the intersection of developmental psychology, neuroscience and genetics that is revealing more every day of how early experience gets into the body and brain.

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 controversy surrounding Justina Pelletier and her family has expanded its scope in recent months, and has now become a general public scrutiny of Massachusetts’s Department of Children and Families. I think there’s a very real risk of confusing some issues here. Every state in the US has a social services department, one of whose statutory responsibilities is to investigate reports of abuse and/or neglect. The system isn’t perfect. But this I do know: the spotlight has been taken off psychiatry. This is critical, because without the “diagnosis” of somatic symptom disorder and the subsequent allegation of medical child abuse, none of what’s happened to Justina and her parents could even have gotten off the ground.

Robert Whitaker’s book, Anatomy of an Epidemic, has provoked all manner of responses.  Some outraged, dismissive, but many supportive and relieved to hear the...

In June this year the BMJ published an article supposedly about how the Black Box Warning that antidepressants cause suicide had led to a drop in the use of the same antidepressants and an increase in suicides. The message was widely trumpeted in daily newspapers and other news outlets as well as the press office of Harvard University and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. In fact there had been no drop in the use of antidepressants and no increase in suicide rates or suicide act rates. The letters sent to the BMJ in response to the article wondering how such a shoddy piece of work could possibly have been published are worth reading – rarely is academic contempt so scathing.

The Sandy Hook Advisory Commission (SHAC) and the State Child Advocate's office still have produced no reports, and the deadlines continually come and go, with virtually no interest on the part of Governor Malloy or Connecticut state lawmakers. What is of interest, though, is the complete run-around and disconnect by those involved in producing the reports.

Conferences, trainings and seminars can play an important role in changing the culture of a community. As Margaret Mead said: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” The work is formidable but the results… man it is worth it!

There has been quite a bit going on in the UK mental health world of late, and MiA already shares some of this in the form of open letters from Anne Cooke, et al. and Richard Bentall. Both are responses to a series of BBC programmes. In their letter Kinderman, et al. also make reference to a recently published report; The Five Year Forward View for Mental Health. This has been published by a so-called independent body; The Mental Health Taskforce to the NHS in England. Readers would find it encouraging; it refers to a need for closer attention to early intervention, to the need to address stigma, for a focus upon life’s transitions, and innovations that could support recovery, personal autonomy and well-being. What happened? Nothing!

In previous posts in this series, I noted that the standard treatment of conditions labeled as schizophrenia (and related disorders) is to start neuroleptics early and to continue them indefinitely. This is based on the belief that untreated psychosis is bad for the brain and that relapse is much higher when the drugs are stopped than when they are continued. The rationale for this approach, and my discussion of the limitations of these assertions, were the topics of previous blogs in this series. In this final post I want to discuss how realistic this paradigm of care is.

Dear Robert, I just finished Anatomy of an Epidemic while on vacation. I am a family physician (and writer) practicing in Colorado.  For years, my practice...

While some will frame Eleanor Longden’s story, told in her awesome TED video (which has now been viewed about 1/2 million times!), as the triumph of an individual struggling against “mental illness,” I believe the story might better be seen as a refutation of the whole “illness of the mind” metaphor, and as an indication of a desperate need for a new paradigm.

Disclosure is an insufficient strategy for mitigating bias because bias does not result from the concealment of financial ties but from their effects. Even worse, social psychologists have demonstrated that when individuals disclose a competing interest, they give even more biased advice.