Causation Theories

"A long-standing enigma in psychiatry has been why no-one has been able to find someone who has both congenital blindness and a diagnosis of...

LiveScience reports from the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting, and provides brief summaries of a plethora of recent research into the effects of diet...

The journal Nature reviews research into "the idea that intestinal bacteria affect mental health." "Now there is hard evidence linking conditions such as autism and...

Pacific Standard features a recent story of a man whose daughter accused him of abuse, but by the end of the court proceedings had...

This weekend I attended an international trauma studies conference in Miami, Florida, where some of the leading researchers and clinicians in the field of trauma gathered to share their innovative projects and findings. Although there were many worthwhile moments, overall I left feeling paradoxically hopeful, saddened, inspired, and a bit dumbfounded. One study after another was presented on "trauma-related disorders" and their associated treatments, yet there was not a single mention of schizophrenia or its related diagnoses. Four days of trauma discussion and the topic of psychosis was nowhere to be found.

Exposure to pesticides is linked to significant increases in suicidal depression in farmers, according to a study by US National Institute of Health researchers...

If molecular genetic research had actually delivered the genes for psychiatric disorders promised by mainstream psychiatry and its subfield of psychiatric genetics, twin research today would be largely obsolete because focus would have shifted to molecular genetic research, and a person’s genotype and diagnosis would be determined directly from his or her DNA. Twin research, therefore, retains its current level of importance in psychiatry only because the genes believed to exist for its disorders, based largely on genetic interpretations of twin studies, have not been found.

"For more than 20 years, I’ve hammered behavioral genetics, and especially research linking genes to intelligence," writes John Horgan in his Scientific American blog...

Is there an alternative to the current, dominant way of making psychiatric diagnoses? If so, what would it look like? On his Critical Psychiatry...

The increasing use of psychiatric medications in toddlers, particularly of stimulants for ADHD, is explored by journalist Josiah Hesse on Substance.com. Looking into possible...

Whistle Blown. On October 5th, 2014, I began an indefinite duration Hunger Strike upon the State of Colorado. I'm doing this because I have hard evidence of a pattern of plea coercion and child abuse coverup at Boulder County Mental Health Center, Inc. in the form of a wire recording of one of their employees, Dan Shearer.

"What is Wrong With You?" is the question many of us are faced with when we seek understanding or assistance while navigating life’s challenges. But it is known that survival skills learned in our youth - often in order to weather difficult situations we have faced - often do not transfer in a healthy way into adulthood. In many cases these previously adaptive behaviors become problematic, then end up pathologized and diagnosed. "What Happened to You?" is a documentary film that explores the proven fact that events experienced while growing up have a cause & effect relationship on our later lives.

Why do people readily accept the data showing that nutrients are good for our hearts, and for prevention and (now perhaps) treatment of cancer . . . but they find it so hard to accept the use of nutrients to make us feel better mentally?

The British Journal of Psychiatry has issued a retraction of an article purporting to have identified evidence of the epigenetic aspects of bipolar disorder,...

If there is one downside to the field of mental health, declares an editorial in The Lancet Psychiatry, "it is the failure of pleasant,...

I am a very optimistic psychologist, but with reason. For 25 years I've been working with people who have had psychological problems in every conceivable area. Many psychologists have problems with burnout, especially early in their careers. For me, this has been very different. By using the treatment techniques that I do, I feel anti-burned out. It is so gratifying to see people get out of their serious problems, that I look forward to every day of clinical work.

More than a year on from the release of DSM-5, a Medscape survey found that just under half of clinicians had switched to using the new manual. Most non-users cited practical reasons, typically explaining that the health care system where they work has not yet changed over to the DSM-5. Many, however, said that they had concerns about the reliability of the DSM, which at least partially accounted for their non-use. Throughout the controversies that surrounded the development and launch of the DSM-5 reliability has been a contested issue: the APA has insisted that the DSM-5 is very reliable, others have expressed doubts. Here I reconsider the issues: What is reliability? Does it matter? What did the DSM-5 field trials show?

In the light of the much trumpeted claims that recent research has identified genes for schizophrenia, it is important to review the track record of this type of endeavor. Despite thousands of studies costing millions of dollars, and endless predictions that the genetics of schizophrenia would shortly be revealed, the field has so far failed to identify any genes that substantially increase the risk of developing schizophrenia.

Note: This post originally appeared on August 18, 2014 on dxsummit.org. On August 5 and 6, 2014, a group of roughly twenty persons met in Washington, DC...

"There are many practitioners, including psychiatrists, who wonder about the sanity and the soundness of the enterprise in general," Gary Greenberg tells the Australian...

Newsweek writer Alexander Nazaryan overviews the recent "kick in the rear" provided to brain science by hundreds of millions of dollars in donations, and...

Recent years have seen an influx of numerous studies providing an undeniable link between childhood/ chronic trauma and psychotic states. Although many researchers (i.e., Richard Bentall, Anthony Morrison, John Read) have been publishing and speaking at events around the world discussing the implications of this link, they are still largely ignored by mainstream practitioners, researchers, and even those with lived experience. While this may be partially due to an understandable (but not necessarily defensible) tendency to deny the existence of trauma, in general, there are also certainly many political, ideological, and financial reasons for this as well.

Anne Skomorkowsky of the Columbia University Department of Psychiatry writes in Truthout about a recent case of a psychiatrist who shot a patient. Skomorkowsky...

Newborn rats can "learn" the fears their mothers have, and then will carry those same fears for the rest of their lives, according to...

In his Alternatives Conference 2012 Address, Will Hall called attention to the ongoing phenomena of “medicalizing poverty and calling it mental illness.” Mental health systems and practitioners often tend to perceive and identify the myriad ways that impoverished people cope and adapt to adverse environments (such as food and housing insecurity) as pathological indicators of mental illness. A poor child who does not pay attention to the day’s lessons at school may be diagnosed with ADHD, yet focuses intense attention on how he will return home safely, take care of his siblings and get a meal. A young woman may be labeled as Oppositional/Defiant who bravely copes with an erratic mother and her abusive boyfriend. Behaviors that can make sense in one context (home, neighborhood), are flagged as dysfunctional and impaired in another (school & work).