Rate of Antipsychotics in Foster Care Climbs
One in six adolescents were taking antipsychotic medications by the end of a five-year study of 686,000 children in foster care in 48 states....
Obstetric Complication, Cannabis Use: Strongest Predictors of Early Psychosis
According to data drawn from 608 patients of an early intervention program in Dublin, presented at the 3rd Biennial Schizophrenia International Research Society (SIRS)...
Psychiatric Journals are More Biologically Skewed than Internal Medicine Journals
Researchers from Tufts University (including Nassir Ghaemi) assessed the ratio of "biological" to "non-biological" in both psychiatric journals and journals of internal medicine. Though...
Nursing Homes Shift Tactics on Dementia
As part of a series on the inappropriate use of antipsychotics in nursing homes, the Boston Globe explores alternative approaches, such as llama therapy,...
Review of the Evidence: Childhood Adversity High in Schizophrenia and Other Disorders
Researchers from Australia and the UK found that people with a schizophrenia diagnosis almost four times more likely than controls to have a history of...
Increased Competition Drives Falsified Research
A ten-fold rise in retractions of scientific (in particular biomedical) papers over the past decade reflects a massive increase in competition for scarce funding...
Most Cases of Tardive Dyskinesia are Permanent
Only one out eight patients, out of 108 with tardive dyskinesia, recovered from the disorder in an Emory University Movement Disorders Clinic study. The...
Long-Term Benzos Worsen Anxiety
Long-term use of benzodiazepines for anxiety remains a widespread, despite guidelines that recommend against it, according to a roundtable discussion at the annual conference of...
Intact Facial Affect Processing in Schizophrenia
In two separate studies (one replicating the other) of 102 people with schizophrenia diagnoses researchers from McGill, UCLA, CSU, UNC, Columbia and the VA...
Prescription Drugs May Cause One Third of All Birth Defects
Up to a third of all birth defects may be linked to prescription drugs, according to a review of the evidence published in The...
Questions About Childhood Trauma And Schizophrenia Settled
In the first analysis of 30 years of studies, including 46 studies (selected from 27,000) involving 80,000 subjects, researchers in the U.K. and Australia...
Benzos Fail to Prevent, May Increase PTSD
In a review of the evidence regarding benzodiazepines, researchers from the University of Michigan find that benzodiazepines used in the treatment of PTSD are...
Army Surgeon General’s Office Warns Against Benzodiazepines and Antipsychotics
The Army Medical Command has determined that benzodiazepines could worsen rather than reduce PTSD and lead to addiction. The April 10 policy memo also...
Does Conflict of Interest Disclosure Worsen Bias?
The editors of PLoS Medicine examine the question of whether financial conflict of interest disclosures increase or decrease the problem of bias. Although "disclosure...
Little Lasting Benefit From ECT
The relapse rate after short-term ECT is high, according to a study in the Journal of ECT, "owing to resistance to medication in these...
SSRIs: More Harm Than Good
Beginning with an "evolutionary analysis" and a review of serotonin's role in the body, researchers from Canada and the U.S. conduct a thorough review...
Exposure to Violence Alters Children’s DNA, Life-Long Health
In a sample of 236 children recruited from the Environmental-Risk Longitudinal Twin Study, researchers from Duke University and King's College London found that children...
Fewer Antipsychotics, More Nurses Will Improve Care and Save Money in Nursing Homes
The Center for Medicare Advocacy advised yesterday that nursing facilities could realize huge savings by eliminating "inappropriate and life-threatening" antipsychotic drugs. The statement added...
Compulsory Hospitalization Does Not Improve Outcomes
Researchers in Israel followed 320 patients who had been admitted involuntarily with schizophrenia diagnoses. Â 157 (49%) left the hospital against medical advice (AMA), and...
The Celebrated Cell Phones of Calaveras County
Calaveras County, CA is being honored for a novel hospital diversion program. By giving cell phones programmed to reach key supporters to repeat users...
Fantasy Video Game Zaps Depression in Adolescents
SPARX, an interactive video game in which significantly depressed adolescents shoot down "GNATs" (Gloomy Negative Automatic Thoughts) in a quest to restore the balance...
Publication Bias in Literature on Antidepressants for Autism
Researchers at the University of Michigan reviewed published and unpublished trials of serotonin receptor inhibitors (SRI) for the treatment of autism spectrum disorders (ASD)....
Income Differentials Cause Mental Illness
Data from the World Health Organization World Mental Health Survey showed that early-onset mental disorders were associated with reduced household income in high and...
Schizophrenia Prevents Cancer; Antipsychotics May Cause It
In a review of all 59,233 individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia in Sweden between 1965 and 2008, researchers from Sweden and the U.S. identified 6137...
Do Benzos Deserve a Major Role in the Treatment of Psychiatric Disorders?
Researchers at the University of Milan and King's College, London thoroughly reviewed the literature available on Medline and Cochrane regarding the use of benzodiazepines...
