Disorders

-Newsweek visits the Hearing Voices Network.

Teaching psychiatrists the appropriate prescribing guidelines for patients with schizophrenia did not reduce the incidence of inappropriate prescribing.

Depressed elderly people are more likely to suffer heart disease not because of their depression, but apparently due to antidepressant drugs.

-Psychiatrist Jose Andres Saez Fonseca disposes with the language of the diagnostic manuals, and tries to grapple with different ways of seeing.

First generation antipsychotics seem to cause general brain volume loss, while second generation antipsychotics seem to both increase and decrease the thickness of different parts of the brain.

-The industry of mobile apps that diagnose users' physical and mental ailments is already worth some $4 billion.

-Psychiatrists analyze why US bipolar diagnoses in children and adolescents increased 40 times over in less than 10 years.

Losing a loved one to suicide hurts like hell: there’s an obvious truth if there ever was one. But there are other truths, some hard, some hopeful. If you’ve suffered such a loss yourself, you know too much of these truths already.

When I was locked in a psychiatric hospital, I wasn't able to have much of a conversation with my parents about what was going on. Phone calls were tense and filled with silence, and as I stood at the ward payphone I was so confused and frozen in fear that each call just confirmed to them how lost I was. Every day as a patient centered around the various prescriptions I was on, and like so many people suffering in a psychosis, helping me became a wait to "find the right combination of medications."

On Madness Radio, Will Hall interviews psychotherapist and author Tim Dreby about his experiences with both external world and internal world encounters with secret...

So here we go again; another meeting with another young person who describes how he is in an acute crisis - you may call it - and is diagnosed and prescribed neuroleptics. He is told by the doctor that he suffers from a life-long illness and he will from now on be dependent on his “medication.” As long as people are met this way I see no alternative than showing that there are alternatives. If that means being "antipsychiatry," then I am more than happy to define myself and our work in that way.

It is generally recognized in antipsychiatry circles that antidepressant drugs induce manic or hypomanic episodes in some of the individuals who take them. Psychiatry's usual response to this is to assert that the individual must have had an underlying latent bipolar disorder that has "emerged" in response to the improvement in mood. The problem with such a notion is that it is fundamentally unverifiable.

The two most popular interventions for ADHD are drugs and stringent control. Those who believe in the traditional biological determinist view assert that others must provide the control that people diagnosed with ADHD lack. In this treatment protocol, diagnosed individuals are remanded into treatment that mimics institutional care (i.e., others control their access to resources and their behavior is restrained with drugs). While both of these impositions can yield some short-term benefits, they can also produce unwanted side effects much like what happens when there is incarceration

The British Psychological Society's Research Digest examines a recent study that found that certain higher ratings of intelligence in people seemed to be correlated with higher ratings of anxiety and rumination as well.

Do you still need your psychiatric diagnosis? The answer for practical purposes is probably ‘Yes.’ In the current system, diagnosis is essential for accessing services and benefits and, particularly in the USA, for covering your treatment costs. But do you need to believe in your diagnosis? Do you have to accept this particular attempt to explain your difficulties, and to take it on as part of your identity by becoming one of the ‘mentally ill’? since psychiatric diagnoses have been admitted to be non-valid even by the people who drew them up, professionals should not be offering people the ‘choice’ of describing their difficulties in diagnostic terms in the first place. That would still leave people with the right to adopt whatever explanation suits them as private individuals.

When I was a psychiatric resident in 1971, the treatment for schizophrenia and manic-depression seemed to be very promising. The hopeful period of deinstitutionalization had just begun. It seemed like we were turning the corner. We were emptying out the state hospitals. And let me tell you, they really were snake pits. And the promise was that patients would return to the community. There they would have individual and family therapy; housing; assistance with working; and help with activities of daily living, when necessary. Finally, an enlightened age... finally.

In his blog Psychology Salon, psychologist Randy Paterson explores what the balance of evidence is showing us after 60 years of increasing medical treatments...

Elderly people in Sweden are five times more likely to be taking antipsychotics if they have a diagnosis of dementia, according to research published in Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica. And among those people with dementia, the lower their education the higher the likelihood they’re taking antipsychotics.

In The Conversation, two psychologists discuss the research evidence into providing early intervention mental health services to the public shortly after large-scale tragedies. They advise that doing nothing is often much better and safer for people.

Guilt, shame and anxiety appear in every known culture. Neither children nor adults seem to escape feeling some of these potentially disabling emotions and probably almost everyone has experienced all three. In my forensic experience, even the most hardened criminals who feel no guilt or shame about committing murder are nonetheless likely to feel guilty about something else, such as thinking or talking negatively about their father or mother. They surely feel shame, and overwhelming shame may have ended up fueling, rather than inhibiting, their murderous reactions. Meanwhile, it is highly unlikely that anyone, criminal or not, has avoided feeling anxiety.

In a 1992 essay, British psychiatric genetic researcher Michael Owen wondered whether schizophrenia molecular genetic research would become the “graveyard of molecular geneticists.”1 Owen predicted that if major schizophrenia genes existed, they would be found within five years of that date. He was optimistic, believing that “talk of graveyards is premature.”2 Owen now believes that genes for schizophrenia and other disorders have been found, and was subsequently knighted for his work. Despite massively improved technology, however, decades of molecular genetic gene finding attempts have failed to provide consistently replicated evidence of specific genes that play a role in causing the major psychiatric disorders.

Psychology Salon psychologist Randy Paterson discusses the Mad In America investigative report about a program that trains physicians and school staff to more readily diagnose mental illnesses in children. "Authors of the initiatives almost always talk about the enhancement of social supports, the provision of psychotherapy, involvement with community, and so on," writes Paterson. "But in the real world of medical practice, screening usually translates into prescriptions written."

The International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry published an article titled Safety and utility of acute electroconvulsive therapy for agitation and aggression in dementia,  which concludes "Electroconvulsive therapy may be a safe treatment option to reduce symptoms of agitation and aggression in patients with dementia whose behaviors are refractory to medication management." But the participants were not a random selection of people taking the drugs in question. Rather, they were individuals selected because of aggressive behavior, most of whom had been taking some or all of these drugs on admission. So it is a distinct possibility that the aggression was a drug effect for many, or even most, of the study participants.

The Fix reviews the past and present of the estimated $2 billion/year industry of trying to "improve" the behaviors and attitudes of "troubled teens." Adolescence...

In the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, Yale University School of Medicine's Gerard Sanacora and Stanford University School of Medicine's Alan Schatzberg examine the scientific literature on ketamine, and discuss some of the promises and dangers surrounding the recent resurgence of interest in the drug as a potential treatment for depression.