Critics Attack Headline-making Marijuana-Psychosis Study

4
-James Coyne and others criticize a UK study for deliberately trying to be politically manipulative.

Brain Injuries Change Lives — Some Find New Pathways, Some Don’t

7
-Two stories explore devastation and hope in response to brain injuries.

Baltimore is Burning: Who Defines ‘Violence’?

120
The person living on the streets with whom no one will make eye contact, or who the police hassle for requesting spare change from passersby. The individual who has learned to cut themselves to manage emotional pain, and so is punished by emergency room staff who sew them up without anesthetic (both physical and emotional pain disregarded), or confuse their efforts for suicide and contain them against their will. The person of color who some might cross the street to avoid, or who is arrested for lashing out when another is murdered at the hands of those employed to ‘serve and protect.’ Each is only looking for a way to survive, but instead finds themselves ignored or blamed.

Sounds of Silence from Inside the Jail

17
I think about a healthy early infancy, about reaching out and being gently held and about the attachment bond that nourishes the mind, body and spirit as I watch the inmate sitting at the table in SuperMax, where the inmates are in isolation due to their high profile status or history of repeated violence inside the jail. I will not touch him and he will not reach out to me. He is a 3rd strike inmate, sentenced to 25 years to life, housed in SuperMax jail while he awaits his last appeal.

Alaskan Indigenous Peoples Experiencing High Rates of Trauma

3
-Two reports found Alaskans of aboriginal descent experiencing very high rates of many different types of trauma.

The Latest News from Twin Research: The Genetic Influence on Political Voting Choices is...

7
There seems to be no end to illogical and even comical “findings” from MZ-DZ twin method comparisons, where the original twin researchers argue that the greater behavioral resemblance of reared-together MZ (monozygotic, identical) versus same-sex DZ (dizygotic, fraternal) twin pairs demonstrates the “heritability” of the behavioral characteristic in question. Among these we find a twin study whose authors concluded in favor of a genetic basis for being a “born again Christian” (65% heritability), another that found important genetic influences on tea and coffee drinking preferences, and still another that found that the heritability of “loneliness in adults” is 48%.

Exactly How Do Gut Microbes Shape Human Behavior?

0
-University College London researchers review the primary physiological mechanisms by which gut microbes can influence the human brain.

How Problematic Assumptions Have Slowed Depression Research

4
-Belgian psychologist Eiko Fried argues that depression is not a discrete disease, but a cluster of independent symptoms that reinforce each other.

Psychiatrists Still Promoting Low-Serotonin Theory of Depression

31
-A psychiatrist asserts that psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies never promoted the idea that serotonin deficiencies could cause depression, and suggests that no one at Mad in America has evidence that they did.

“Poverty Shrinks Brains from Birth”

5
-A recent study of 1,099 children, adolescents and young adults found poverty associated in a dose-response manner with poorer brain development.

Monday Morning Correction: Okay, Some Psychiatrists Do Say Schizophrenia is a Brain Disease

2
-Ronald Pies and Duncan Double discuss Pies' recent claim in Psychiatric Times that no psychiatrists believe or assert the unproven notion that schizophrenia is a biological brain disease.

HIV Can Infect Brain, Cause Serious Psychological Problems

1
-The National Institute of Mental Health reports that HIV can infect brains very quickly and lead to a variety of psychiatric symptoms.

Largest Survey of Antidepressants Finds High Rates of Adverse Emotional and Interpersonal Effects

163
I thought I would make a small contribution to the discussion about how coverage of the recent airline tragedy focuses so much on the supposed ‘mental illness’ of the pilot and not so much on the possible role of antidepressants. Of course we will never know the answer to these questions but it is important, I think, to combat the simplistic nonsense wheeled out after most such tragedies, the nonsense that says the person had an illness that made them do awful things. So, just to confirm what many recipients of antidepressants, clinicians and researchers have been saying for a long time, here are some findings from our recent New Zealand survey of over 1,800 people taking anti-depressants, which we think is the largest survey to date.

Have We Found The “Overhype Gene”?

3
-John Horgan criticizes psychiatrist Richard Friedman's effusive portrayal of a study that allegedly identified the "feel-good" gene in humans.

Are We “Plastic People”?

0
-How are learnings in epigenetics re-defining human bodies and brains, and what does that mean for our ideas about "normalcy"?

“The Strange World of Felt Presences”

1
-"What links polar explorer Ernest Shackleton, sleep paralysis, and hearing voices?" asks The Guardian.

Moral and Political Implications of the DSM

2
-A special issue of Public Affairs Quarterly examines "the moral and political implications" of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Critical Psychiatry Position on Schizophrenia

1
-"They argue that the concept of 'schizophrenia' is neither valid, nor useful, and suggest replacing it with more generic concepts such as 'psychosis' or 'madness'."

“Thinking from the Gut”

0
-A Nature Supplement explores innovations in our understanding of the human microbiome, and burgeoning methods of intervention.

Risks of Preterm Births for Developing Brains

4
-Nature explores our growing understanding about the risks of preterm births for the development of children's brains.

Strep Infection and Neurological and Psychiatric Disorders

1
-CTV's W5 news program investigates the possible links some researchers are drawing between relatively common strep throat infections and the causing of neurological or psychiatric problems in children.

Former APA President: “What Does the New York Times Have Against Psychiatry?”

10
-Jeffrey A. Lieberman discusses the "indignity" that psychiatry suffered as a result of a recent article by Tanya Luhrmann.

Dear NIMH, Is It Really a Chemical Imbalance?

4
-Bev MacPhee writes about her efforts to get the National Institute of Mental Health to substantiate its statements that mental illnesses are caused by chemical imbalances.

Understanding the Impacts of Trauma

1
-A series of articles from the Connecticut Mirror investigate the impacts of trauma on people's lives and brains.

The Dangers of Getting “Diagnosed”

1
-"When we treat diagnosis as simply a medical issue, we mask the tremendous social power involved in putting a name to human suffering."