Depression

Researchers at Tufts University exposed rats and their children to early life stress, resulting in depressed maternal care, aggression, increased restlessness and anxiety-related...

The Mail sent three women to their doctors, reporting fictional symptoms of short-term, mild depression.  Two walked out with prescriptions for medication, despite expressions...

The idea of spending more time as a bureaucrat in the US Embassy in Iceland did not appeal to me. I longed for the freedom that academics have. While pursuing that dream I stumbled into the world of international media, “chemical imbalance”, book publishing and a greedy professor of psychiatry which was a prelude to my second annus horribilis.

While increasing numbers of Americans are being prescribed antidepressants, the Centers for Disease Control reports that suicide rates increased 28% from 1999 to 2010. Trained professionals remain unable to predict who is at risk. Their guess is as good as chance.

A study comparing the effects on cognition of major depression (MDD) vs. SSRIs finds that healthy subjects learn significantly better from positive feedback than...

Michael Wilusz discusses his experience struggling with emotional distress, the ensuing regimen of psychiatric drug treatment, and his process tapering off of the drugs.

An anti-anti-stigma campaign The whole anti-stigma campaign is something of a joke. Google the word “stigma,” see for yourself. Mental health labels are inherently stigmatizing,...

We have good reason to despair, to feel anguish, and pain. We have a planet that we are poisoning. We have people populating the planet who like to harm one another. We have families who, in their own pain and trauma, pass on that pain and trauma to their children. We face tragedies of all kinds just by being alive. Being human is DIFFICULT. It’s also the most amazing adventure and it can be very very painful to wake up to just how amazing and outrageous this life we’ve been given is. It’s no small task for any of us.

If you haven't been labeled mentally ill by the American Psychiatric Association, you have to ask yourself what's wrong. Perhaps you were ahead of the game: you knew not to reveal yourself to them, you knew how to avoid them, you found other social support, and if so, a big congratulations. If not, what's wrong? Why have you conformed?

The Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care has reversed its 2005 recommendations, finding methodological flaws, possible bias, and uncertain generalizability in a review...

What makes the DSM so pernicious is that it is a cultural document whose influence transcends not only psychiatric practice but also the Western civilization from which it originates. Each revision of the DSM rescripts and reimagines how we make sense of our experiences, reinterprets what thoughts, feelings and behaviors are socially sanctioned, and ultimately what it means to be human.

For everyone who goes on psychiatric drugs, the reason comes back to power imbalances in their personal life. Women who's husbands “make all of the money” and have an unequal share of the power, kids who's parents have power over them—frequently people who have less money and security, therefore less platform for authority than those around them. Mental illness is not in fact an illness but an unequal division of power and sense of security in a social group.

A study of the Swedish medical birth registry, conducted by researchers from Sweden, the U.K., and the U.S.A., found a 3.3X greater risk of...

You May Be Suffering From Antidepressants (The Adbusters) YouTube →

Dr. Oz looks at the research on antidepressants today, finding that they are over-prescribed, may be counter-productive or harmful, may not work at all,...

Yesterday I attended psychiatry grand rounds, where Andy Miller presented his latest research. Andy has been a pioneer in the field of psychoneuroimmunology and an exponent for the view that major depression reflects systemic inflammation. (I have published a review of this literature recently in Frontiers in Psychology which is available for download).

Despite the integral importance of blinding and blinding assessment to randomized controlled trials (RCTs), they are rarely reported on or documented in trial reports...

A review of research on antipsychotic medications as an adjunctive treatment for depression published this week in PLoS Medicine finds that the widespread practice...

In his book, Prayer is Good Medicine, physician and researcher Larry Dossey maintains that praying for one's self or others can make a scientifically measurable difference in recovering from illness or trauma. It is one thing to understand such a healing intellectually; it is another to know it from experience. Such an experience came to me in the fall of 1996.

Japanese engineers have devised a robotic rat that bullies laboratory rats into a state of depression, creating a model of human depression they deem...

A prospective study of 2,422 children from 2004 to 2012 found that children whose parents reported Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) and depressive symptoms were...

Ketamine (known in social circles as "Special K") has been touted as a rapid-acting and "profound" treatment for depression. The Journal of Psychosocial Nursing...

When people ask me how I began working on my last book, Crazy Like Us, I tell them about meeting Dr. Laurence Kirmayer at McGill University back in 2005. He took time one afternoon to tell me a remarkable story about a personal encounter he had with the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline and the remarkable resources that the company employed over the last decade to make their antidepressant pill Paxil a best seller in Japan.

Allen Frances, writing in the Huffington Post, calls the decision in the forthcoming DSM-5 to call grief in the bereaved a disorder as soon as...

While Sylvia Plath and Ernest Hemingway received extensive medical treatment for depression but tragically committed suicide, other famously depressed people—including Abraham Lincoln, William James, Georgia O’Keeffe, Sigmund Freud, William Tecumseh Sherman, Franz Kafka, and the Buddha—have taken different paths. Did those luminaries who took alternative paths and recovered really have the symptoms of major depression, and did their antidotes really work?