Issues

-Facebook has made it easier for users to report posts from people who seem to be in psychological distress, but not everyone likes the plan.

-Nine out of ten health-related web visits result in personal health information being leaked to third parties.

-Counselor and artist Sara Nash asks whether its good that she rarely shares her own experiences of inner pain when she talks to college students about suicidal ideation.

-Motherboard reports on an implantable chip that can hold hundreds of doses of drugs and be activated by remote control.

-Scientific American discusses a new $215-million initiative to create a massive database of the personal health information of one million people.

For nearly two decades, Big Pharma commercials have falsely told Americans that mental illness is associated with a chemical brain imbalance, but buried SAMHSA survey results tell us that depression and suicidality are associated with poverty, unemployment, and mass incarceration. And these results also point us to the reality that American society has now become so especially oppressive for young people that an embarrassingly large number of American teenagers and young adults are depressed and suicidal.

-Since research has dispelled many of the common beliefs about the causes of mass murders, is it time for us all to look inward for the real roots?

The present-day mental health establishment focuses primarily on a ‘biological’ cause for despair and other so-called ‘aberrant’ mental manifestations in the world. But when we look at the news, it’s bursting with sad realities. Animals dying, people starving, rape everywhere. Climate change bringing more disasters, racist mortgage practices. Are we to grow a skin so thick that we don’t cry when we read about a government firing scud missiles on its people? How are we to process mass-murder in an elementary school? What is more aberrant: to be so hardened that we do not cry, or to cry constantly? Might the healthy response to depressing realities to become depressed? How do we create hope when so often our world seems so terrible? How much activism is enough?

-An article In Disability and Society asks why iacademic research approaches which "at first seem inviting and like they might even help to disrupt psychiatric control," so often seem to "ultimately resort to marginalising mad people’s own knowledge."

-In Patient POV, Laura Newman argues that nursing homes are hiding their poor health and mental health practices -- including racist ones -- from the general public.

Greater cumulative doses of drugs that are anticholinergic or block the neurotransmitter acetylcholine are associated with significant increases in dementia and Alzheimer's.

People who have taken a psychedelic drug at least once have less suicidal thinking than the general population.

-"It’s hard to listen to a psychiatrist who sounds so broken," writes Sulome Anderson in The Atlantic.

A study into prejudice, hatred and violence directed against people with mental health issues is seeking public input.

-A Washington Post story suggests that Centers for Disease Control researchers are worried about what they'll find if they investigate the causes of gun violence.

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

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.

In JAMA, several Texas medical doctors and health information experts discuss the rapidly expanding number of "medical scribes" being hired by physicians to enter medical information into electronic health records (EHRs). Many doctors are finding electronic health records to be inefficient and unhelpful, they write, yet governments continue to mandate them.

In the New York Times, Natasha Singer discusses last year's launch by the Samaritans of an app that allowed people to track others' mental...

Interviews in io9 with neuroscientists James Giordano of Georgetown University Medical Center and Jonathan Moreno from the University of Pennsylvania supplement a discussion of...

Medscape surveyed 21,000 physicians on a wide range of ethical issues, and provides slides summarizing their answers. A small sampling: "Would you ever perform a procedure...

Bloomberg Businessweek investigates the companies involved in buying and selling mass databases of people's prescription-drug histories, and the new ways in which that information is being used by skirting privacy protections.

In the New York Times' Op-Talk, Anna North interviews Jonathan Metzl about his recent study showing how little gun violence and mental illness are...

Rather than a "lack of insight," it is actually a thoughtful weighing of complex risks and benefits that ultimately drives some people diagnosed with bipolar disorder to eschew psychiatric medications, according to a qualitative study in the Journal of Affective Disorders. And these people often develop sophisticated strategies in their efforts to manage without medications.

Writing in the Genetic Literacy Project, David Warmflash discusses a recent study that identified two genes "associated with violent crime." Even though people with...