Featured News

The Restoring Invisible and Abandoned Trials (RIAT) proposal, backed by the British Medical Journal and PLoS ONE last week, calls for the "responsible publication and...

Researchers from London, Sydney and Stanford examine the literature related to the expanded expenditure on healthcare-related drugs and devices over the last 15 years,...

In the film Avatar scientists are keen to exploit the moon planet Pandora, which is inhabited by 10-foot-tall blue humanoids called Na'vi. To do so they create Na'vi human hybrids called “Avatars” which are controlled from afar by genetically matched humans. When the scientists decide to destroy the eco-system of the planet to gain access to valuable minerals, war breaks out between the humans and the Na'vi. At this point the main character, Jake, who operates an Avatar, has to choose whose side he is on. Eventually Jake's life is saved and transformed by the Tree of Souls, which the humans are trying to destroy. Why are Avatars in the news again? The latest innovation from psychiatric research is using computer generated avatars to help people who hear aggressive voices.

Researchers from Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute test the behavioral effects of SSRIs on Pavlovian fear conditioning in rats, and...

In a systematic literature review, researchers from Canada and Japan found that the antipsychotic aripiprazole (Abilify) was significantly and causally related to increased increased...

David Oaks, whose 1998 challenge to "check out the research for yourself" led Robert Whitaker to write Mad in America and create this website,...

U.K. researchers find, in a systematic literature review and meta-analysis of medical (not only psychiatric) treatments that when bias is ruled out and effects...

Robert Whitaker notes on Al Jazeera's "Inside Story" that a helpful diagnostic text must be both reliable and valid, and the DSM is neither...

Jeffrey Lieberman, incoming president of the APA, responds to criticism of the DSM and psychiatry, saying "it’s important to understand the difference between thoughtful,...

A 33-year controlled, prospective study conducted as a collaboration by researchers in New York, Mexico, and Verona, Italy found that men diagnosed with ADHD...

Schizophrenia Bulletin publishes a review of published articles that finds the use of schizophrenia subtypes (Catatonic, Disorganized, Paranoid, Residual & Undifferentiated), "while widely used...

The Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care has reversed its 2005 recommendations, finding methodological flaws, possible bias, and uncertain generalizability in a review...

MIA reader/commenter Brett Deacon's article in the prominent Clinical Psychology Review says that despite "widespread faith in the potential of neuroscience", the biomedical era has...

The Economist, in its upcoming edition, says of the DSM "No other major branch of medicine has such a single text, with so much...

The New York Times reports that the "baffling" rise in suicide rates in the U.S. military is not correlated to deployment, as is often...

A meta-analysis of studies of mental health websites by John Read found that 42% are either drug company owned or receive funding from drug...

Johnson & Johnson is negotiating with federal authorities over language that might be used in dozens of civil lawsuits regarding abnormal breast development and...

A study of 530,000 patients who underwent surgery at 375 U.S. hospitals found a 10% increased risk of post-operative complications including bleeding, transfusion, hospital...

MIA blogger (and lawyer) Jim Gottstein presented a 20-minute Oral Argument in ex rel Watson v. King-Vassel in front of the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago last Thursday. "The technical issue on appeal is a lawyer nerd question about whether expert testimony is required," said Gottstein, "but I like to think it contains a succinct and clear explanation of why even though a doctor can prescribe a drug for anything, if they prescribe one off-label to a child they are causing a False Claim (committing Medicaid Fraud) unless the use has support in at least one of the specified drug references called Compendia."

Based on a psychiatrist's recommendation that the effects of citalopram (Celexa) had contributed to a 61 year-old grandmother's lethal bludgeoning of her friend of...

The U.K.'s Mail reports of an effect of SSRIs that, though rare, has shown up in significant numbers of people according to David Healy's...

Researchers in Germany, China and Australia teamed up to find, through a meta-analysis of research pertaining to 1045 patients receiving antipsychotics, that augmentation with...

Research into stigmatizing attitudes towards behavior, published in Early Intervention in Psychiatry, finds that most study subjects did not spontaneously apply diagnostic labels to...

French researchers looked at the outcomes of 467 "antipsychotic drug-naive" patients six months after a first psychotic episode (and treatment with medication), finding that...

Chinese researchers find, in a literature review for the International Journal of Endocrinology find an increased rate of osteoporosis among people with a schizophrenia...