Adult

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).

In a study of 6,767 reports of antidepressant trials in juveniles treated for depressive and anxiety disorders, the risk of psychopathological behavioral or mood...

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

Martin Harrow and Thomas Jobe have a new article coming out in Schizophrenia Bulletin that I wish would be read by everyone in our society with an interest in “mental health.” Harrow and Jobe, who conducted the best study of long-term schizophrenia outcomes that has ever been done, do not present new data in this article, but rather discuss the central question raised by their research: Does long-term treatment of schizophrenia with antipsychotic medications facilitate recovery? Or does it hinder it?

Richard Bentall, clinical psychologist and author of Madness Explained presents new evidence for the limitations of anti-psychotic medication and of the psychiatric establishment. Institute of...

Psychiatrists at the University of Minnesota forced a young man into a profitable study of antipsychotic drugs over the objections of his mother, who desperately warned that his condition was deteriorating and that he was in danger of killing himself. On May 8, 2004, Mary Weiss' only son, Dan Markingson, committed suicide. A petition to the governor of Minnesota now asks for an investigation.

Part 1 of this series examined how the disease model of addiction intersects with the genetically based “mental illness” theory and practice of Biological Psychiatry. Part 2 analyzed the serious limitations and sometimes harmful effects of the domination of addiction treatment by the Twelve Step (disease model), and how Biological Psychiatry has both seized upon and expanded the culture of addiction in this country. What follows will be a presentation of some alternative methods for overcoming addiction problems.

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

Researchers in London and Spain, in a prospective, randomized, study of long-term (3 year) effects of first- and second-generation antipsychotics on neurocognition in 79...

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...

The New York Times, in an extraordinarily lengthy front-page article, chronicles the descent of popular college class president, athlete, and aspiring medical student into...

There was a heart-breaking and disturbing story in yesterday’s Guardian newspaper entitled, My Daughter, the Schizophrenic’, which featured edited extracts from a book written by the father of a child called Jani. He describes how Jani is admitted into a psychiatric hospital when she is 5, diagnosed with schizophrenia when she is 6 and by the time she is 7, she has been put on a potent cocktail of psychotropic medications.

When we begin to question, we discover that (1) scientifically flawed research has been used to promote ideas around mental illness and its heritability, and (2) instead of focusing on nature vs. nurture causes of mental illness, it’s time to consider whether certain phenomena are really symptoms of pathology or instead are inextricable aspects of our humanity.

In the business of clinical trials, the most valuable commodities are the research subjects. Filling clinical trials is hard, and filling them quickly is even harder. That’s why in 2000 a clinical investigator told the HHS Office of the Inspector General that research sponsors were looking for three things from research sites: “No. 1—rapid enrollment. No. 2 — rapid enrollment. No. 3 — rapid enrollment.”

“The voices, they tell me they gonna kill me, and it’s my fault.” “Sometimes, when we hear voices, they just reflect our own anxieties, sometimes they can echo things we’ve been told in the past. When the voices tell you that they’re going to kill you, does that echo anything you may have been told in the past?” I ask.

In my last post, I argued that the single most damaging effect of psychiatric diagnosis is loss of meaning. By ruthlessly divesting experiences of their personal, social and cultural significance, diagnosis turns ‘people with problems’ into ‘patients with illnesses.’ Horrifying stories of trauma, abuse, discrimination and deprivation are sealed off behind a pseudo-medical label as the individual is launched on what is often a lifelong journey of disability, exclusion and despair.

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.

In early 2009, antipsychotic fraud was making headlines.  Eli Lilly had announced in January that it would plead guilty to charges that it had...

We have just celebrated the anniversary of the rapidly expanding global Hearing Voices Movement which was founded more than twenty-five years ago following the ground-breaking research of Professor Marius Romme and Dr Sandra Escher. Romme and Escher have advocated for a radical shift in the way we understand the phenomenon of Hearing Voices; in contrast to traditional, biomedical psychiatry which views voices as an aberrant by-product of genetic, brain and cognitive faults, their research has firmly established that voices make sense when taking into account the traumatic circumstances that frequently provoke them.

by Eugene Epstein, Manfred Wiesner, and Lothar Duda Over the past 50 years, the psychiatric and psychotherapeutic discourses of the western first world have infiltrated...

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...

Robert Whitaker's keynote presentation in Brighton, England explores the problems of the evidence base at the heart of the medical model, particularly for ‘psychosis’, and discusses the Open Dialogue approach from Finland.