Causation Theories

With the explosion of genetic testing and the emerging field of pharmacogenetics, patients can now take a DNA test and receive psychiatric drug recommendations customized to fit their genetic makeup. In an editorial for the latest issue of the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, Columbia University Psychiatrist Robert Klitzman warns that clinicians need to be aware of the limitations of these genetic tests being marketed to them.

Adhering to a commonly prescribed medication for ADHD in children is associated with higher chances of being prescribed antidepressants in adolescence.

From Forbes: Increasing evidence shows that smartphones can be addictive, and that smartphone addiction can have a very negative impact on our mental health, especially...

Popular addiction news outlet, the fix, interviews Dr. Gabor Maté on addiction, the holocaust, the "disease-prone personality" and the pathology of positive thinking. “Until...

The drumbeat for more "Risk Management" just gets louder. And nowhere is this so alarmingly evident as a new policy proposed by the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health (DMH) in November 2012.

In this blog post, Eiko Fried disputes the pervasive assumption that the most common psychiatric diagnoses are biologically based brain disorders, asserting that the...

Amidst a reported leveling in medication usage among young children, a disturbing side trend has emerged. Antipsychotic medication use in preschoolers has soared over the past decade, to the upwards tale of a two- to five- fold increase despite lack of FDA approval in almost all of these medications for this age group and little to no information about long-term side effects. In addition, researchers have noted that most antipsychotic medications were being used off-label, and increasingly for the treatment of behavioral issues that many argue are both developmentally inherent and often a product of significant environmental dysfunction.

From The Chronicle: The practice of pharmaceutical industry payments to academic researchers to help promote their drugs remains widespread. Requiring scientists to disclose their ties...

Katie Hafner, writing in the ‘Times, describes how loneliness has become a major public health issue. “The profound effects of loneliness on health and...

A case analysis of an American Indian woman illustrates how the DSM diagnostic criteria misrepresent the lives of indigenous people.

Writing in The Guardian, Oliver Burkeman discusses the comeback of Freud’s psychoanalysis, along with humanistic therapy, interpersonal therapy, transpersonal therapy, and transactional analysis and...

The U.K.'s Guardian newspaper concludes that "The government is right: children need love as much as they do vitamins – and a lack of...

"Mixed anxiety-depressive disorder," "attenuated psychosis syndrome," "obsessive-compulsive personality disorder," "antisocial personality disorder," and "nonsuicidal self-injury" were among diagnoses that met with disappointing results in...

The New York Times Profiles Bessel van der Kolk, and the controversial approaches to working with trauma, such as yoga and "tapping," that he...

-For indigenous peoples, the modern mental health system in North America often represents little more than a new form of colonialism and domination, writes David Walker.

As I walked alone up the stairs to the Rayburn House Office Building this morning to attend the hearing of the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health on H.R. 3717 - the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act - I thought about how I wasn’t truly alone. In spirit with me were all the people who had experienced scary, coercive, and dehumanizing interventions in the name of help. In spirit with me was every mental health provider who went into the field hoping to really make a difference in their communities, but became cynical and discouraged in the face of so many broken systems and broken spirits.

In this piece for Medium, Brendan O'Neill critiques campaigns that aim to de-stigmatize "mental illness" and the trend toward identifying as "mentally ill." "The problem here...

Psychologists and people with experience of psychotic symptoms publish a report on new ways of understanding psychosis.

From The Atlantic: A recent study found that increases in unemployment rates are associated with increased opioid overdoses and emergency room visits. Article →­

In a meta-analysis funded by the World Health Organization and published in The Lancet, studies of 21,500 disabled individuals from Australia, Canada, New Zealand,...

A new study, published in The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, investigates the presence of posttraumatic stress symptomatology in children involved in motor vehicle collisions...

Psychiatric molecular genetic research has failed to discover genes that underlie the major psychiatric disorders, the existence of which twin and adoption studies are assumed to have established. "Genome-wide complex trait analysis" (GCTA) was developed a few years ago as a means of solving what researchers call the "missing heritability" problem. One researcher believed that the new GCTA method would “drive a stake through the heart of” criticism of behavioral genetic theories and methods, and would finally put criticism of twin studies “to rest.” The opposite scenario appears to be playing out, however, as leading behavioral genetic and psychiatric genetic researchers struggle to prevent some recent negative GCTA findings and the obvious false assumptions underlying twin research from driving a stake through the heart of twin studies themselves.

In the last 30 years, acupuncture and Chinese medicine have become increasingly popular as a modality for helping people not only with health concerns but also with emotional distress and addictions issues.  Acupuncture has been especially helpful for people who are detoxing from drugs and alcohol as well as those who have experienced a high degree of trauma, such as returning military veterans.  One of the most innovative and wide spread ways of helping this population is through something known as the five needle protocol, or the NADA protocol.

A new review in BMJ investigates overdiagnosis in primary care settings, where the majority of mental health care is provided in the U.S.

video platformvideo managementvideo solutionsvideo player Psychotropic Drugs and Children June 15, 2010 Robert Whitaker, author of Anatomy of an Epidemic, discusses the disturbing effects of psychotropic drugs...