Antidepressants

From Psychiatric News: According to a new study, patients who take antidepressants simultaneously with benzodiazepines are at an increased risk of becoming long-term benzodiazepine users. Article...

In this post for Better Health While Aging, Dr. Leslie Kernisan discusses the importance of making sure that older adults are taking the minimum amount...

A lawsuit filed Wednesday in San Jose, California seeks federal approval for two class-action lawsuits representing all U.S. users of the antidepressant Zoloft, accusing...

My name is Leah Harris and I'm a survivor. I am a survivor of psychiatric abuse and trauma. My parents died largely as a result of terrible psychiatric practice. Psychiatric practice that took them when they were young adults and struggling with experiences they didn’t understand. Experiences that were labeled as schizophrenia. Bipolar disorder. My parents were turned from people into permanent patients. They suffered the indignities of forced treatment. Seclusion and restraint. Forced electroshock. Involuntary outpatient commitment. And a shocking amount of disabling heavy-duty psychiatric drugs. And they died young, from a combination of the toxic effects of overmedication, and broken spirits.

The popular smoking cessation drug Chantix is the medication that most frequently makes people feel suicidal or homicidal, according to figures gathered by the...

The recent research scandals out of the University of Minnesota’s Department of Psychiatry may be alarming, but they are not new. Back in the 1990s, when the university was working its way towards a crippling probation by the National Institutes of Health (for yet another episode of misconduct (this time in the Department of Surgery), the Department of Psychiatry hosted two spectacular cases of research wrongdoing, both of which resulted in faculty members being disqualified from conducting research by the FDA.

Commentary in the American Journal of Psychiatry cautions that the “unbridled enthusiasm” about Ketamine as a "miracle cure" for depression "needs to be tempered...

Surveyed doctors overestimate pharmacological effects of antidepressants and underestimate placebo effects.

In the interest of the patients who are currently experiencing withdrawal reactions and the many more who will suffer withdrawal effects in the future, we need to end this “war.” Academic psychiatry must address these problems and conduct thorough research on withdrawal reactions.

Researchers in the Netherlands followed 248 nursing home residents with dementia for two years, finding that even 25% of the defined daily dose of...

A change.org petition out of the United Kingdom is addressing the extreme difficulty faced by people who attempt to taper off of antidepressants and...

There is accumulating evidence that taking SSRI antidepressants increases the risk of bleeding and other complications during surgery, according to a review published in the British Journal of Anaesthesia.

I have given up on psychiatry as a system capable of “being there” for people who are dealing with life and death issues. Psychiatry as a system of care lacks validity. Every day — unfortunately — we learn of new examples proving this statement. But here's the good news: every day we meet people who show us that the predictions of psychiatry are not true; that there are “cures,” that it is possible to reduce or withdraw psychiatric drugs.

In Parts I-IV, I discuss how the DA succeeded in gaining the conviction by means of highly emotional and at times misleading and untruthful manipulations in public and in the courtroom. Here I want to look more closely at the DA’s motivation and other activities. Was it a personal vendetta?

Prominent researchers conduct a review of antidepressant withdrawal incidence, duration, and severity. Results lead to call for new clinical guidelines.

In parts of Wales in the UK, one in six adults takes antidepressants and support for anyone struggling with dependence or withdrawal issues is patchy and inconsistent. To help draw attention to these issues, an awareness day was arranged for the Welsh Government and here we provide video of the presentations made at the Senedd in Cardiff, Wales.

Researchers at the University of Michigan reviewed published and unpublished trials of serotonin receptor inhibitors (SRI) for the treatment of autism spectrum disorders (ASD)....

From Pacific Standard: Young children are increasingly being prescribed psychiatric drugs. However, there is very little research on the safety and efficacy of psychotropic drugs...

On April 19, 2014, The Lancet published an article titled Do we underestimate the benefits of antiddepressants?, by German psychiatrists Mazda Adli and Ulrich Hegerl. The authors argue that randomized controlled trials (RCT's), as currently conducted, systematically underestimate the benefits of antidepressants and overestimate the benefits of psychotherapy. But what's interesting is that in all the years that pharma-psychiatry was churning out its fraudulent, spurious and self-serving "findings," I never heard of a single complaint from psychiatry about these kinds of methodological issues.

The authors of Study 329 began recruiting adolescents for a comparative study of Paxil, imipramine and placebo in 1994 and finished their investigations in 1997. They dropped a large number of their original cohort, so the randomness element in the study must be open to question. Late in 1998, SmithKline Beecham, the marketers of Paxil, acknowledged in an internal document that the study had shown that Paxil didn’t work for adolescents in terms of the two primary and six secondary outcomes they had established at the start of the study. In a nutshell, Study 329 was negative for efficacy and positive for harm, contrary to their succinct upbeat conclusion.

School aged children exposed prenatally to psychotropic medication show poorer outcomes in cognitive ability.

In response to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, ISEPP, a non-profit mental health research and education network, issues a statement calling for a...

The New York Times reflects on various explanations for the skyrocketing use of antidepressants (the economy, pharmaceutical advertising, the effect of insurance), then reports...

A Nigerian study finds that more than three-quarters of patients improved, even when only 13% were prescribed medication.

An Israeli study of 10,621 women found that those taking an SSRI more than 80% of the time were 1.4 times more likely to...