Issues

From The Guardian: According to a new Human Rights Watch report, U.S. nursing homes are inappropriately prescribing antipsychotics to an estimated 179,000 residents with dementia each...

Critical participatory action research conducted on the higher education programs offered in prison leads to mobilized advocacy and shifts in public policy.

Researchers find that psychometric properties in the CES-D, developed for White adults, may not adequately measure the lived experience for Black adolescents.

Few DTC drug advertisements fully adhere to FDA guidelines, the overall quality of information provided in DTC advertisements is low, and some advertisements market off-label indications.

A couple of days ago, after two years of fighting, I received Mylan Pharmaceuticals assessment of the causal link between their drug Fluox and my son's suicide. Their conclusion is identical to that of the New Zealand drug regulator Medsafe, that the SSRI antidepressant Fluoxetine is the probable cause of Toran's death. The rating of 'probable' includes an assessment that Toran's suicide was 'unlikely to be attributed to disease or other drugs.'

At CounterPunch, Joseph Natoli connects Big Pharma, mass shootings, and rampant inequality. He writes: “The Brave New World soma strategy to deal with a population that, were they not doped up, might violently disrupt that brave new world, is useful if a society is ‘creatively destroying’ a growing number of its population each day. While the poor have daily evidence of their poverty, a collapsing middle class live in the illusion that they are middle class and just a short distance, not from ruin, but from fame and fortune. They are, in short, heading for a catastrophic break-down. Big Pharma is already set to give us all a ‘soft landing.’”

From Sapiens: Researchers are increasingly recognizing the role that social and environmental factors, including childhood abuse, stressful events, and poverty, play in the development of...

The paradox of relieving chronic pain with an antidepressant (and a new set of symptoms).

In this piece for the Centre for Medical Humanities, James Whitehead reflects on the 25th anniversary celebration of the publication of Louis Sass's Madness and Modernism. "A...

In this piece for Truthout, Noel Hunter lists seven facts it is important to be cognizant of during Mental Health Awareness Month, from the influence...

Researchers find evidence of low socio-economic status White Americans’ rising distress and declining well-being since the mid-1990s.

Researchers detect disparity between white and African American patients diagnosed with schizophrenia when symptoms of a mood disorder are present.

From Unbound: In 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. preached that he was proud to be psychologically maladjusted to racism, slavery, segregation, religious bigotry, and economic...

From Medical Xpress: A recent study found that the language used in a patient’s chart notes may affect how well that patient is treated, and how...

From Vox: Recently, psychologists Patrick Forscher and Nour Kteily surveyed members of the alt-right to build the first psychological profile of their movement. Compared to the...

Bernie Sanders joins numerous public health groups and opposes Robert Califf's nomination to lead the FDA over industry ties.

After the 2009 suicide of a seven-year-old foster kid who had been on two “black box” medications intended for adults, Florida updated its policies to protect vulnerable children from over-prescription. Unfortunately, according to a report by Orlando Weekly, “foster children are still being put on psychotropic medications without caregivers following proper procedures.”

"A STAT investigation finds that “Most research institutions — including leading universities and hospitals in addition to drug companies — routinely break a law that requires...

Black patients are almost twice as likely as their white counterparts to be diagnosed with schizophrenia while whites are significantly more likely to receive a diagnosis of anxiety or depression, according to a recent study published in the journal Psychiatric Services. The researchers also found that the likelihood of receiving psychotherapy for any diagnosis (34%), regardless of race or ethnicity, was much lower than the likelihood of receiving a psychotropic medication (73%).

Out here in Minnesota, where the snow is gently falling, many of us are hunched over our computers, puzzling over a document just posted by the state Board of Social Work. It concerns the death of Dan Markingson (or as the document calls him, “Client #1”). Markingson, of course, was a young man under a commitment order who was coerced into a profitable Seroquel marketing study at the University of Minnesota over the objections of his mother, and whose condition spiraled downward until he committed suicide.

I thought I would make a small contribution to the discussion about how coverage of the recent airline tragedy focuses so much on the supposed ‘mental illness’ of the pilot and not so much on the possible role of antidepressants. Of course we will never know the answer to these questions but it is important, I think, to combat the simplistic nonsense wheeled out after most such tragedies, the nonsense that says the person had an illness that made them do awful things. So, just to confirm what many recipients of antidepressants, clinicians and researchers have been saying for a long time, here are some findings from our recent New Zealand survey of over 1,800 people taking anti-depressants, which we think is the largest survey to date.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy and Cognitive Behavioral Writing Therapy both reduce PTSD symptoms in children who experienced a single traumatic event.

From ThinkProgress: A new study found that the majority of counselors in the United States are not prepared to identify or treat race-based trauma, which...

In this piece for The Atlantic, Joseph Frankel compares and contrasts the voice-hearing experiences of self-described psychics and mediums with the experiences of people diagnosed with...

Dan Markingson was floridly psychotic and unable to give informed consent when University of Minnesota researchers coerced him into an industry-funded drug study. His mother, Mary Weiss, warned the researchers that Dan was in danger of killing himself, but she was ignored. Dan committed a violent suicide in 2004. Last week, after fighting the university and research regulators for nine years, Mary suffered a severe stroke. Her struggle for justice is in serious danger.