Psychiatric Drugs

A large-scale study of depression-related brain activity may also reveal whether a connection exists between the high rates of both psychotropic medication and suicide...

Japanese engineers have devised a robotic rat that bullies laboratory rats into a state of depression, creating a model of human depression they deem...

Drugs that pass into the water supply can alter the behavior of fish, according to a paper published today in Science magazine. Experiments using...

Tom Sullivan of Fox News asks psychiatrist Peter Breggin, author of Medication Madness, whether drugs rather than guns are at the heart of mass...

Twenty-five years before Prozac, 1 in 10,000 of us per year was admitted for severe depressive disorder - melancholia. Today at any one point in time 1 in 10 of us are supposedly depressed and between 1 in 2 and 1 in 5 of us will be depressed over a lifetime. Around 1 in 10 pregnant women are on an antidepressant.

Clinical and research psychologist Paula Caplan presents a keynote address entitled "Psychiatric Survivors Speak Up: Harm From Psychiatric Diagnosis, and a Start on Solutions" at the 2012 National Association for Rights Protection and Advocacy (NARPA) Conference in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Prozac, having failed as an antihypertensive then anti-obesity drug, was marketed as an antidepressant after it lifted the spirits of five mildly depressed volunteers...

Psychotropic medications, including short-acting benzodiazepines, strongly increase the frequency of falls in the elderly, according to research from the Netherlands published in Maturitas: The...

Annals of Pharmacotherapy reports in a study of patients undergoing mechanical ventilation that 39% were given antipsychotic medication to prevent or treat delirium despite...

When patients come to me with complaints of low libido, low or flat mood, weight gain, hair loss, and cloudy thinking, one of my first questions is “Are you on the Pill?”. When they come complaining about premenstrual irritability, insomnia, tearfulness, bloating, and breast tenderness, requesting that I sanction beginning a course of oral contraceptives and perhaps an antidepressant, the one-size-fits-all-cure-all of psychiatrists and gynecologists nationwide, my first comment is “There’s a better way.”

A prospective study of 2,422 children from 2004 to 2012 found that children whose parents reported Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) and depressive symptoms were...

Ketamine (known in social circles as "Special K") has been touted as a rapid-acting and "profound" treatment for depression. The Journal of Psychosocial Nursing...

In the BMJ this week there is a debate about the antidepressants. On the “Yes, The antidepressants are overprescribed” side is Des Spence. This is hardly a new debate and Des Spence makes a good case for the overuse of the antidepressants, but what caught our eye was the response by Adrian Preda, and his discussion about the findings of Irving Kirsch.

The New York Times, in an extraordinarily lengthy front-page article, chronicles the descent of popular college class president, athlete, and aspiring medical student into...

Vanda Pharmaceuticals, Inc., announced this week that its new antidepressant Tasimelteon failed to beat placebo in trials, and that it has hence ended its...

Researchers from the Mass General and Brigham & Women's Hospitals and the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine find, using data from electronic health records...

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...

In the business of clinical trials, the most valuable commodities are the research subjects. Filling clinical trials is hard, and filling them quickly is even harder. That’s why in 2000 a clinical investigator told the HHS Office of the Inspector General that research sponsors were looking for three things from research sites: “No. 1—rapid enrollment. No. 2 — rapid enrollment. No. 3 — rapid enrollment.”

This is the second in my new series, “Haiku for social change”, the first having appeared on my own blog page. Since this piece is about pharmacology and psychopharmacology, I think MIA is a good home for it.

If you’ve ever driven your car in a blizzard, you realize that the biggest hazard isn’t the snow or ice on the road; it’s mostly other drivers. You of course have your own vehicle (and welfare) to look out for, and it’s certainly stressful driving slowly, keeping traction on the slippery tarmac, maintaining concentration, watching out for black ice, and so on. But these variables remain somewhat under your control. Other drivers; not so much.

A google link to a Forbes magazine article titled "Psychiatric Drugs, Not A Lack Of Gun Control, Are The Common Denominator In Murderous Violence"...

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

The Journal of ECT, looking at the question of whether antidepressant medications at the start of ECT reduced post-ECT relapse in a sample of...

Bob Fiddaman writes about Janne Larsson, whose dogged journalism brought to light closely-guarded information that revealed the true extent of antidepressant-related suicides associated with...

Last year (2012) the British Medical Journal (BMJ) published a study from 5 Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden) based on more...