Adult

Like millions, I am sitting with the fact that one of the funniest people to grace the planet has died by his own hand. Robin Williams’ death has hit people of my generation, Generation X, especially hard. After all, his face flashed often across our childhood screens. Mork and Mindy episodes were a source of solace for me as a little girl, as I bounced around between foster homes and family members' homes, while my single mother cycled in and out of the state mental hospital, fighting to survive. I could laugh and say “nanu, nanu - shazbot” and "KO" and do the silly hand sign and forget for just a little while about living a life I didn’t ask for.

There's an interesting article in Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics.  It's called The Efficacy of Antidepressants on Overall Well-Being and Self-Reported Depression Symptom Severity in Youth: A Meta-Analysis. The authors concluded: "Though limited by a small number of trials, our analyses suggest that antidepressants offer little to no benefit in improving overall well-being among depressed children and adolescents." In the Discussion section of the paper, they stated, "We found no evidence that antidepressants offer any sort of clinically meaningful benefit for youth on self-report measures of depression, quality of life, global mental health, or parent reports of autonomy."

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.

On July 28, I published a post called Simon Says: Happiness Won't Cure Mental Illness.  The article was essentially a critique of a post written by British psychiatrist Simon Wessely, that essentially said that all psychiatric treatment alleviates suffering and makes people happier.  The falsity and self-serving aspect of this contention is glaringly obvious, and I drew attention to this. My essential point is this:  psychiatric drugs; illegal street drugs; alcohol and nicotine, all have in common that they confer a temporary good feeling.  That's why people use them.  But they also have in common that they are toxic substances, and if taken in sufficient quantity over a long enough period, they will inevitably cause organic damage.

A systematic review of studies of stimulant medications for ADHD has concluded that the drugs should be used as a last resort, in rare...

As a prescription drug and addiction expert for The O’Reilly Factor, Fox National News and many other news outlets, I am often called when a celebrity death occurs. While the loss of a talented actor or musician is tragic, I know from personal experience that the magnitude of devastation from legal drugs is happening to millions of innocent people – through psychoactive medications.

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).

When constructing the ADHD diagnosis, progenitors essentially say, "Let's study a group of people who do particular hyperactive, impulsive, and distracted behaviors that are associated with chronic and pervasive problems in school, social life, and work. If the person is an adult, the problems must be present in childhood and show consistency throughout development. We will call this group "ADHD" and study correlated biological characteristics and other associated difficulties. We will continue to tweak the criteria so that the diagnostic net falls on the people with the correlated dysfunctions and patterns of biology that we find in our research.

In his Scientific American blog, Gary Stix reviews the latest investigations into the impacts of comprehensive lifestyle change approaches to preventing dementia. "Results of...

The Atlantic reports on Tanya Luhrmann's recent research, published in the British Journal of Psychiatry "That suggests that the way people pay attention to...

Finnish reseachers report in Schizophrenia Research that antipsychotic use is associated with cognitive and memory impairments. The University of Oulu team studied forty people...

I had a soul-redemptive heart-to-heart reunion with a woman I had known from a distance but whom now (after our hours long coeur-a-coeur/heart-to-heart) I consider a close friend. I shared with her some very exciting and some challenging circumstances I have been experiencing of late. After I shared and shed a few tears she told me a story from her life that also poses, like my story, an invitation for profound change in our lives.

People diagnosed with schizophrenia experience reductions in brain volume that increase over time, and the amount of those reductions increases in proportion to the...

Many personal stories of people struggling with an addiction that they were never told could happen punctuate an article about indiscriminate benzodiazepine prescribing in...

The sub-heading "A pill to dampen memories stirs hope and worry" opens a reflective essay in Nautilus by Emily Anthes on the neuroscience and...

People who take statins are at “significantly greater” risk of memory impairment than those who don’t take the popular cholesterol-lowering drugs, according to research...

The kinds of experiences we call psychotic are often incredibly scary: people feel they are being persecuted by strange forces, or that their brains have been invaded by demons or riddled with implants from the CIA . . . the list of possible fears is endless, and often horrifying. While standard mental health approaches counter many of these fears, they often create new fears of a different variety.   Wouldn’t it be helpful if professionals were trained in an approach that could help people shift away from both dangerous psychotic ways of thinking and also away from the sometimes equally terrifying explanations which emphasize pathology?

Even though about 10% of American children have been diagnosed with ADHD and most are taking stimulant medications for it, Boston Children’s Hospital researchers...

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) has become the province of geneticists, neuropsychologists, and physicians. The prevailing view is that ADHD behaviors are caused by a neurobiological delay and that treatment must include medication and stringent management. While this general attitude may continue to prosper, there is increasing concern that we are proposing the existence of a medical problem when there are no biological markers or dysfunctions that reliably correspond with the behavioral criteria. It is vital that we more closely examine traditional beliefs about ADHD and review the shortcomings of commonly used treatments.

Researchers from the University of Bonn and King’s College London were “amazed” at the range of experiences associated with schizophrenia that were induced in...

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has released a meta-analysis “Evidence Report” of the studies into...

I was taught in medical school and psychiatric residency not to talk to people about their voices and their delusions: “It will only feed into them and make them worse.” Nor was I supposed to argue with people with paranoia because they’ll just get agitated and won’t change their mind anyway. We were taught that the psychoanalysts had wasted a lot of time trying to connect people with psychosis by trying to find meaning in their psychosis. I was taught that there is no meaning. All we needed to know about their psychosis was enough to prescribe medications and assess if the meds worked.

In a recent Ted Talk, “Depression is a Disease of Civilization.” professor Stephen Ilardi advances the thesis that depression is a disease of our modern lifestyle. As an example, Ilardi compares our modern culture to the Kaluli people — an indigenous tribe that lives in the highlands of New Guinea. When an anthopologist interviewed over 2,000 Kaluli, he found that only one person exhibited the symptoms of clinical depression, despite the fact the Kaluli are plagued by high rates of infant mortality, parasitic infection, and violent death. Yet, despite their harsh lives, the Kaluli do not experience depression as we know it.

No one has been tracking whether or not US veterans have been benefiting in any way from over $3.2 billion annually in mental health...

Psychiatric Times has published a discussion of the research comparing the effectiveness of antidepressant medications under different conditions. “First, there seem to be no...