Pfizer Loses Appeal of Neurontin
On Monday the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Pfizer's appeal of a $142 million award to the Kaiser Foundation for illegal marketing of Neurontin. The...
Sandra Steingard Article Questioning Psych Meds Published in WaPo
The Washington Post yesterday published an article by MIA blogger Sandra Steingard, titled "A Psychiatrist Thinks Some Patients are Better off Without Antipsychotic Drugs." In...
FDA Investigator: “The Clinical Trial System is Broken”
A featured article in the British Medical Journal relates the perspective of FDA investigator Thomas Marciniak, who says “Drug companies have turned into marketing machines. They’ve kind of...
PsychRights Dismisses Watson v. King-Vassel, Medicaid Fraud Case
Counsel for ex rel Watson v. King-Vassel - Psychrights' latest effort to show that prescribing medication for children that is not supported by scientific evidence constitutes fraud...
Canadian Study Links Cannabis and Psychosis in Youth
The Cannabis and Psychosis Awareness Project, a four-year study from Canada that was released on Tuesday, finds that smoking marijuana - particularly heavy use in...
PA Court Affirms Dismissal of Paxil Wrongful Death Suit
A Pennsylvania Superior Court has affirmed a lower court's ruling that GlaxoSmithKline is not responsible for the congenital heart defect that lead Joanne Thomas...
Abilify Lawsuit Dismissed
LAW360 reports that a Pennsylvania federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit over a movement disorder attributed to Bristol-Myers' drug Abilify. The judge held that...
Childhood Stress Subtypes Predict Adult Psychiatric Subtypes
A review of the literature from 2001 to 2011 on child abuse, neglect, and psychiatric disorders finds that early life stress subtypes can predict...
J&J Asks to Keep Risperdal Studies Under Seal
Law 360 reports that Johnson & Johnson asked a Pennsylvania judge to keep a series of clinical studies related to the drug Risperdal under...
Murder/Suicide Lawsuit Blames Chantix
The widow of Darwin Stout - who murdered their son and took his own life while taking the nicotine-cessation drug Chantix - has filed...
Leader in World Psychiatry Calls for Radical Change
- Incoming president of WPA questions medical model
- Focus should be on functioning, not symptoms
- Says psychiatry has much to apologize for
Increasing Mental Health Diagnoses of Youth, by Non-Psychiatrist MDs
The mental health care of young people has increased more rapidly than that of adults, and has coincided with increased psychotropic medication use, according...
Chairman of DSM-5 Task Force & Others Belatedly Admit Conflict of Interest Related to...
The authors of a paper that endorses a computerized test for depression have acknowledged failure to disclose joint ownership of a company formed to bring the test to...
Diagnosis Dispute Traps Teenager in Boston Children’s Hospital
Justina Pelletier, a 15-year-old Connecticut teenager who had been diagnosed with mitochondrial disease, remains trapped in Boston Children's Hospital 9 months after a team...
J&J Fraud Plea Prompts Academics to Regret Participation
Following Johnson & Johnson's record $2.2 billion settlement for criminal marketing — including $1.4 billion related to its marketing of Risperdal, making it one of the...
Sleep Therapy for Depression
Pending research on the connection between insomnia and depression offers new prospects for treatment, according to recent articles in the New York Times. "Psychiatrists...
Neuroleptic Malignant Syndrome Linked to Polypharmacy, Benzos, and Race
Research from London and Taipei finds that neuroleptic malignant syndrome (NMS) is associated with the number of different antipsychotics used (polypharmacy), rather than the overall...
Childhood Social Function & Schizophrenia
A 48-year longitudinal study of 244 subjects, published in Schizophrenia Research, finds that those with schizophrenia-spectrum diagnoses had had the worst social functioning scores at...
Benzos & Brain Tumors
Researchers in Taiwan found a 3.33x greater risk of benign brain tumors in patients who had been prescribed benzodiazepines for at least 2 months....
Antidepressants & Sexual Function
Two studies of the effects of antidepressants on sexual function - one on the relative effects across classes of antidepressants on men, the other...
Environment is a Primary Factor in Transition to Psychosis
Researchers (including Jim van Os) find, in a three-year cohort study of 1272 people at possible genetic risk of psychosis, that "most transitions (to psychosis)...
Childhood Trauma Linked to Bipolar Diagnosis, Symptoms
Research on a sample of 587 patients with DSM-IV defined bipolar disorder finds that an earlier age at onset of bipolar illness - along...
U.K.’s Guardian Survey: “Your Experiences of Antidepressants”
The U.K. newspaper The Guardian asked readers of five newspapers in the U.K., Germany, France, Spain and Italy to talk about their experiences of...
Call for Papers: Critical Underpinnings of User/Survivor Research and Co-Production
The journal Philosophy, Psychiatry & Psychology is calling for proposals for papers "aimed at tackling the 'hard' questions implicated in processes of user/survivor inclusion,...
One in Five Diagnosed With ADHD May Develop Cocaine Habit as Adults
Research from Boston University suggests that exposure to stimulant medications such as Ritalin during adolescence may result in cocaine addiction in later life. “You...
