Psychiatric Drugs

In an upcoming study in Psychiatric Services, US and Canadian researchers report that the strongest predictors for over-medicating of people being treated for schizophrenia...

FDA approvals are less influential on prescribing patterns than pharmaceutical sales marketers are, according to a study in Health Affairs. University of California and...

German psychiatrist Stefan Leucht and colleagues have produced another really important paper. The results indicate that the small differences usually found between antidepressants and placebo are far below the sort of differences that would be clinically detectable or meaningful. Leucht et al. have conducted the first thorough, systematic attempt to provide some empirical evidence about what constitutes a clinically meaningful difference in scores on depression rating scales, although the study did not set out to explore antidepressant effects.

Psychiatrist Richard Friedman argues in the New York Times that there are aspects of natural brain development that make teenagers more prone to both...

The American Psychological Association is lauding a new Illinois law allowing certain types of psychologists to prescribe psychiatric medications. “This is a landmark moment...

Giovanni Fava has published an integrative analysis of the different sources of scientific research into antidepressants in Psychotherapy and Somatics. “The use of antidepressant...

“Live, healthy babies are the most common outcome following the use of antipsychotic medication in pregnancy,” conclude Australian researchers in a study that was...

Psychiatric Times has published a discussion of the research comparing the effectiveness of antidepressant medications under different conditions. “First, there seem to be no...

Thanks to the work of Dr. Irving Kirsch, we now know that the majority of the effect of antidepressants is attributable to the "active placebo effect" or the belief that receiving a memified brain-chemical-corrector will actually help alleviate symptoms. As I discuss in this post, evaluation of published and unpublished data, in two metanalysis, demonstrated a non-clinically significant difference between placebo and antidepressants. A fascinating new study entitled The Role of Patient Expectancy in Placebo and Nocebo Effects in Antidepressant Trials further explores the power of belief in psychiatric treatment.

Examining the link between depression and loss of employment, a study by American researchers in the British Journal of Psychiatry found that cognitive therapy...

In a review of 852 trials of pharmacotherapies and psychotherapies for major psychiatric disorders, involving 137,126 patients, an international team of researchers found that...

As part of the Affordable Care Act, the federal government has made a commitment to integrate behavioral health with physical medicine. Physicians have saddled America with addiction to antidepressants, antipsychotics, and benzodiazpines. If the federal government decides that opiate addiction is ok, as they seem to have conceded, shouldn’t the question be “what is the cheapest and the safest opiate?” In Europe, heroin is an option right along with buprenorphine and methadone. It seems to me that the “back-door” legalization of opiates under the guise of “treatment” ought to at least be debated out in the open.

My mother was once a bright, creative, beautiful young woman, a promising artist and a poet, who was captivated by the hippie movement. She was a creative bohemian artist, defying the conventions of our middle-class Jewish Midwestern family, which had carried a tradition of holding emotions inside and acting stoic. One day, soon after my grandparents’ divorce, she left. She hitched a ride to California, and from that point on, was never the same. The police picked her up on a park bench in Arizona, and she was committed for the first time at age 18. She rotated in and out of mental hospitals, the streets, and jail until her death.

The Melbourne Herald Sun reports that "The prescription of some atypical antipsychotics has more than doubled . . . Psychiatrist Dr George Halasz who has been vocal about...

The alleged “Prom day” killer, Christopher Plaskon, is a snap shot of the future result of Connecticut’s increased mental health services. The 17 year-old's defense apparently will be that his “mental health” caused his murderous actions – not the dangerous psychiatric drugs he obviously has been taking for some time.

Sometimes I get so sick of the lies of biological psychiatry that I must speak out. At these moments I find silence to be a kind of emotional death: a death of my spirit, a death of my critical faculties, a death of my courage. I speak out because I am alive and I wish to align with life.

After ten years of litigation, Pfizer has agreed to pay $325 million for marketing its anticonvulsant Neurontin for unapproved purposes.  The settlement comes six...

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.

Sometimes I happen upon folks talking about the work on Beyond Meds when I’m out and about on the internets. The other day for example I found a google group full of people who were largely inspired by the work on this blog. It was a lovely and surreal moment as I accidentally eaves dropped on their comments of gratitude about having found Beyond Meds. Today instead I stumbled upon a comment in which the person mused the opposite. She was not at all comfortable with my message . . .