Alan Dershowitz Will Work With Justina Pelletier’s Family on “Broader Constitutional Issues”
Harvard Law professor (emeritus) Alan Dershowitz will represent Justina Pelletier in her family's fight to regain custody from the state of Massachusetts and Boston...
Intensive Care Patients at High Risk for PTSD, Psychiatric Symptoms
People who survive life-threatening illnesses in the intensive care unit (ICU) of a hospital are at high risk for depression and anxiety and nearly...
Negative Symptoms Are Key to Recovery From Psychosis
Researchers from Aarhus University in Denmark find from a 10-year follow-up of participants in a randomized controlled study of brief antipsychotic medication (the OPUS...
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...
Meta-analysis Shows Antidepressants Offer Little to No Benefit to Well-Being of Depressed Children and...
Seeking to rectify the fact that "no meta-analysis has included measures of quality of life, global mental health, self-esteem, or autonomy" (or self-reports of...
Antipsychotic Drug Associated with Potentially Fatal Skin Rash
The US Food and Drug Administration is warning the public that the antipsychotic medication ziprasidone "is associated with a rare but serious skin reaction...
FDA System for Recording Adverse Drug Effects Perilously Deficient
The system that the US FDA is using to gather and report on information about dangerous side effects from medications is extremely unreliable and...
Off-Label Antipsychotic Use Among Children Soaring
Researchers from Philadelphia and Baltimore find, in a study of Medicaid records for 50 states and the District of Columbia, that antipsychotic prescribing to...
A Father Grievesa Rush to Medicate
"Diagnosis: Human", a New York Times op-ed, deftly and stirringly captures the paradoxes of the ADHD medication explosion: "My son was no angel (though...
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...
Adverse Emotional and Interpersonal Effects of Antidepressants
Adverse effects of antidepressants, including sexual difficulties and emotional numbing, apathy, suicidality and withdrawal effects may be more frequent than previously reported, according to...
Common Parkinson’s Drugs Linked to Pathological Gambling and Hypersexuality
"Pathological gambling, hypersexuality, compulsive shopping and other impulse control disorders were associated with the use of dopamine receptor agonists, often prescribed for Parkinsonās disease,...
Lower Education Linked to Higher Antipsychotic Use in Swedish Elderly
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 theyāre taking antipsychotics.
FDA: Antidepressant Trials Have Not Adequately Reported Sexual Dysfunction Side Effects
US Food and Drug Administration scientists want to better evaluate side effects of sexual dysfunction associated with antidepressant drugs.
Undisclosed Financial Conflicts Endemic in Clinical Practice Guidelines
While there has been a recent push to account for financial conflicts of interest in medical research, less attention has been paid to organizations...
One-third of Youth Treated for Bipolar Developed Schizophrenia Symptoms
Over one-third of young people who were treated for bipolar disorder developed schizophrenia within eight years, according to a study in Schizophrenia Research. In...
Members of FDA Advisory Committee Offer Perspectives on Flibanserin Approval in JAMA
In the September issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) three FDA advisory committee members describe the convergence of factors that made the committeeās recommendation to approve flibanserin especially challenging and politically charged.
Antidepressants Plus Immune Response Terminate Pregnancies in Mice
Also, male mice born to mothers with an immune response exhibited āautistic-likeā behaviors, scientists report.
Happiness and First-Episode Schizophrenia
Canadian researchers find that 31 people with first-episode schizophrenia diagnoses were as happy as 29 controls, according to a self-reported questionnaire measuring happiness, life...
Hospital Stays for Juvenile Bipolar Jumped 434% from 1997 to 2010
A report from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project finds that hospital stays for a diagnosis of bipolar disorder in children aged 5-9 increased...
Many Unforeseen Drug-drug Interactions Possible By Following Clinical Guidelines
If doctors follow UK government guidelines, they could endanger patients who have both depression and any of a number of other common diseases or conditions.
National Initiative Launched to Get People Out of Prisons and Into Treatment
The American Psychiatric Foundation has announced the launch of a pharmaceutical company-funded national initiative to move people from jails into psychiatric care.
Researchers Investigate Antidepressant-Induced Suicidal Ideation
An increase in suicidal thoughts is a known and serious side-effect for various types of antidepressants. Recent studies suggest that there may be some...
Reading the RIAT Act: A Call to Publish Unpublished Data
The Restoring Invisible and Abandoned Trials (RIAT) proposal, backed by the British Medical JournalĀ and PLoS ONE last week, calls for the "responsible publication and...
Jury Awards $4M for Topamax Birth Defect
After an hour of deliberation, jurors decided that the anticonvulsant Topamax (topiramate) had, in fact, caused April Czimmer's son to be born with a...
