Mood Stabilizers

The hearing for Bill H4062: Informed Consent for Benzodiazepines and Non-benzodiazepine Hypnotics took place on Monday – in the middle of an April snowstorm! The discussion clarified some important points in the legislation and gave survivors an opportunity to tell their stories. I was so proud to be there and witness the courage, camaraderie, resilience, advocacy, and vulnerability of fellow survivors. This legislation is our chance to be heard. As one survivor said, through tears, to the committee, “Do not let my suffering be in vain. I beg you to pass this bill.”

Singer Sinead O'Connor announced on her website that after several "second opinions" she has learned "I do not in fact suffer from Bi Polar...

Researchers find that valproate decreases brain volume in a region associated with emotion processing across all participants.

It is very common for psychiatric patients, especially those diagnosed with schizophrenia, to be prescribed two or more psychiatric medications at once, and this...

by Chaya Grossberg July 25, 2012 He also told me the shrinks were changing around his drugs and adding more.  They added an antidepressant or two to the Lithium and increased doses and eventually he seemed to have very little life left in him.  Our phone calls became trying for he was so down, practically dead sounding a lot of the time, and I felt unable to do anything or say anything to make a difference.  To even try felt futile and I wondered if talking to me at all was becoming the burden of yet another person he couldn't connect with. In the early years, he liked to think of us as being in the same boat, both mentally ill, since I'd also had a meltdown and I also am extremely sensitive and go through extreme states.  But as the years went by, especially towards the end, I seemed to be in the ever growing “other” camp in his eyes, which meant I was yet another person who didn't get what it was like to be him. And at that point I can confirm I did not, and perhaps did not want to.

Children who were exposed to anti-seizure drug valproate in utero were 48% more likely to develop ADHD, according to a new study.

"... Absence of clear practice guidelines for psychotropic medication use in children with ASD" leads to a range of drugs for depression, anxiety, psychosis...

I was first given Lithium Carbonate in the spring of 1984, and I was taken off Lithium by my attending physician in 1996, but left on other drugs. It took me until 2012 to realize psychiatry is a sham. So often people tell me, “I don’t care what my life is like ten years from now. I only want to feel good now.” I may have said the same thing twenty years ago. Now I have the hindsight to know that my viewpoint back then was juvenile at best. I try to warn other patients these days. It’s hard to joke around about something that kills people.

The killing of 20 children and six adults in Newtown has triggered a search for some way of preventing these kinds of tragedies.  The...

In this piece for Medscape, Jodi S. Cohen chronicles the research malpractice case of child psychiatrist Mani Pavuluri, who put vulnerable children at serious risk...

A touching article in the Las Vegas Sun follows one child from abandonment through foster placements, polypharmacy, suicidality, delinquency and homelessness to stability off...

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...

Research from Germany finds that people with schizophrenia or schizoaffective diagnoses given multiple medications - an antipsychotic plus a benzodiazepine or more than one...

I lived through forced ECT from 2005-2006 at the Institute of Living in Hartford, Connecticut. My experience with ECT was the impetus for me to become involved in the antipsychiatry and Mad Pride movements, although I am not entirely opposed to voluntary mental health treatment. The following is the comment I submitted to the FDA on its proposal to down-classify the ECT shock device.

Researchers from Tufts and Harvard find in a review of 233 medical charts of psychiatrically hospitalized youth at three points in time (1991, 1998...

The authors of an article in Journal of Psychosocial Nursing reviewed the literature on psychotropic PRN medications in order to respond to a request to...

In this piece for Healing Journey, Anne O'Beirne briefly summarizes the history of the medical usage of lithium and describes the impact that the drug has...

The idea of spending more time as a bureaucrat in the US Embassy in Iceland did not appeal to me. I longed for the freedom that academics have. While pursuing that dream I stumbled into the world of international media, “chemical imbalance”, book publishing and a greedy professor of psychiatry which was a prelude to my second annus horribilis.

New research demonstrates that children diagnosed with ADHD at younger ages are more likely than those diagnosed later to receive multiple medications within five years of their diagnosis.

Pleading guilty to marketing Depakote for behavioral problems in dementia patients, a purpose for which the drug was not approved, a federal judge has...

Analysis of longitudinal data from 2000-2014 demonstrate mortality gap is widening between persons with a diagnosis of bipolar or schizophrenia compared to the general population

Four different studies conducted in different ways examining different groups have linked use of certain psychiatric drugs to bone fracture risks and negative impacts on human bone development.

New research published in the August issue of Psychiatric Annals evaluates the results of randomized control trials on the use of various psychotropic drugs for patients diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD). Despite the “American Psychiatric Association’s practice guidelines endorsement of SSRIs as first-line therapies for BPD,” the results of the meta-analysis reveal that pharmacotherapy in BPD is “not supported by the current literature,” and “should be avoided whenever possible.”

A third of patients who have taken the common psychiatric medication lithium for over ten years have developed "chronic renal failure" from the drug.