Children and Adolescents

Dutch psychiatrist and epidemiologist, Jim van Os, has renewed his call to drop schizophrenia as a disease classification. “Several recent papers by different authors...

Adhering to a commonly prescribed medication for ADHD in children is associated with higher chances of being prescribed antidepressants in adolescence.

Bloomberg reports that the FDA asked Pfizer in August “to modify safety warnings for its antidepressant Zoloft (sertraline) and acknowledge for the first time that some studies linked the mood-altering medication to heart defects in newborns.”

A new study published in the journal Neuroscience finds that rats given regular doses of amphetamines during adolescence have brain and behavioral changes in adulthood....

The story of Michelle Carter and Conrad Roy is not only a tragedy within itself and for all those involved with them, it is emblematic of the situation faced by millions of young people in the western world and increasingly around the entire planet. Final installment in the series.

A review of academic textbooks finds that they often leave out effect sizes and molecular genetics findings, both of which suggest minimal impact of genetics on ADHD. Instead, textbooks focus on overblown conclusions from behavioral studies.

A team of American and Chinese researchers funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences report in JAMA Pediatrics that lead concentrations in...

On this episode of America's Lawyer, Mike Papantonio discusses the numerous lawsuits pending involving the anti-psychotic drug Abilify, which has caused plaintiffs to develop serious...

The odds of a child with Downs Syndrome being on a psychotropic medication increase steadily with age.

From Fox43: Last week, two Pennsylvania state representatives, Tom Murt and Stephen Kinsey, introduced a bill to prohibit the use of electroconvulsive therapy on children...

From U.S. News & World Report: While some medical marijuana advocates claim that certain strands of weed may help with depression, research on the effects of...

From The Conversation: Witnessing violence, via both media coverage of disturbing events and in-person aggression, can have a serious, long-term impact on children's mental health. Article...

Study suggests interparental conflict causes lasting damage in the way children are able to recognize and process emotions.

An article published in Pediatrics is the first to examine the relationship between physical activity and depression in middle childhood (years 6 to 10) longitudinally.

With the ties between traumatic childhood experiences and mental health issues, should we continue to focus on biological approaches?

On his website, Dr. Nardo details the hidden risks and bad science behind the growing practice of using atypical antipsychotics to augment antidepressant treatment for severe depression. The story of Atypical Antipsychotic Augmentation of Treatment Resistant Depression is a “prime example” “to illustrate how commercial interests have invaded medical practice.” “Besides the obvious dangers of the Metabolic Syndrome and Tardive Dyskinesia, these drugs don’t really do what they’re advertised to do – make the antidepressants work a lot better.”

From STAT: Concerned about the potential adverse effects of ADHD medications, some parents are addressing their children's ADHD through nutrition-based approaches. Article →­

My mother was once a bright, creative, beautiful young woman, a promising artist and a poet, who was captivated by the hippie movement. She was a creative bohemian artist, defying the conventions of our middle-class Jewish Midwestern family, which had carried a tradition of holding emotions inside and acting stoic. One day, soon after my grandparents’ divorce, she left. She hitched a ride to California, and from that point on, was never the same. The police picked her up on a park bench in Arizona, and she was committed for the first time at age 18. She rotated in and out of mental hospitals, the streets, and jail until her death.

For nearly two decades, Big Pharma commercials have falsely told Americans that mental illness is associated with a chemical brain imbalance, but buried SAMHSA survey results tell us that depression and suicidality are associated with poverty, unemployment, and mass incarceration. And these results also point us to the reality that American society has now become so especially oppressive for young people that an embarrassingly large number of American teenagers and young adults are depressed and suicidal.

Researchers interviewed doctors about the barriers that prevent them from being able to decrease excess medications.

The results of epidemiological studies of the prevalence of hallucinations strongly imply that psychosis exists on a spectrum, according to the Scientific American. This suggests “that the standard treatment for a psychotic episode might be due for an overhaul.”

Robert Neugeboren, who “spent most of his adult life in institutions, often subject to isolation, physical punishment and numbing medication,” was “a celebrity of sorts in the world of the mentally ill: a survivor of the horrors of mistreatment, a case history for those who point to the positive effects of kindness and talk therapy, and, perhaps most of all, the embodiment of the bottomless mystery of the human mind.”

Research from the University of Maryland finds that "Although 'psychosis-like experiences' (PLEs) may reflect elevated risk for onset of serious mental illness," further examination...

I was a psychiatrist who participated in the Recovery After an Initial Schizophrenia Episode Early Treatment Program (RAISE ETP). Although I welcomed the positive headlines that heralded the study's results, the reports left me with mixed feelings. What happened to render the notion that talking to people about their experiences and helping them find jobs or go back to school is something novel?

It's common for children and adolescents to take prolonged "drug holidays" from their ADHD medications during summer months away from school, and there appear...