Research

A study published in the journal Pediatrics reveals large differences from one pediatrician to the next when it comes to diagnosing and prescribing drugs for ‘ADHD.’ The researchers found that the percentage of children being diagnosed with ‘ADHD’ varied from as high as 16% of patients at some offices to as little as 1% of patients at others. The data also revealed significant but lower variability in the pediatric diagnosis of anxiety and depression.

A new study claims that quantitative research in psychology is “worryingly imprecise” and that generalizations may be flawed and misleading.

-Vox interviews the founders of a platform for sharing peer reviews of scientific articles.

For the USC Center for Health Journalism, Martha Rosenberg points out the absurdity of allowing industry funded doctors to teach classes to practitioners about psychiatric drugs. "What if the written road test drivers take were sponsored by BP or Shell and had marketing messages interspersed?"

In this interview for Scientific American, psychiatrist John Halpern discusses some of the potentially therapeutic effects of peyote, ayahuasca, psilocybin, MDMA and other psychedelics. "Once when...

Suicide needs to come 'out of the closet' as a public health issue. But this in turn requires a broad, ongoing community conversation rather than the current status quo of 'experts' talking about us without us. We also need to move beyond the excessive medicalisation of suicide that blames it on some notional 'mental illness'. This is my first post where I introduce myself, telling you a little of how I came to do a PhD in Suicidology. And an invitation to join me in a radically different conversation about suicide, here at Mad in America.

A controversial move by the Australian Federal Government plans to screen 3 year olds for early signs of mental illness as part of routine...

Pacific Standard features a recent story of a man whose daughter accused him of abuse, but by the end of the court proceedings had...

The House Subcommittee on Health will hold a hearing tomorrow (Thursday, April 3, 2014) on the “Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act," also...

Researchers at the Rockland Psychiatric Center in New York found that of the 39% of female inpatients who were mothers, the majority reported having...

For STAT news, Pharmalot correspondent Ed Silverman reports on a new guideline being drafted by the FDA that adds new rules that could restrict...

The "independent report" that investigated the complaints against Peter Gøtzsche (which included a complaint from E. Fuller Torrey) reveals that they arose in connection with his criticisms of psychiatric drugs. The Cochrane Collaboration's ouster of Gøtzsche betrays a commitment to open-minded science that is vital to serving the public good.

"Parachute NYC: an alternative approach to mental health treatment and crisis services" has been awarded $17,608,085 to fund "a need-adapted treatment model (NATM) intervention for...

The Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care has reversed its 2005 recommendations, finding methodological flaws, possible bias, and uncertain generalizability in a review...

Researchers testing the blood of 14 teenage subjects with major depressive disorder and 14 with no disorder for a set of candidate biomarkers from...

An article in PLoS One, by researchers at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, finds that less than half (45%) of clinical...

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

In a review of the evidence regarding benzodiazepines, researchers from the University of Michigan find that benzodiazepines used in the treatment of PTSD are...

Federal prosecutors have rejected as insufficient the $1 billion settlement reached two months ago between Johnson & Johnson and prosecutors in Philadelphia to resolve...

Today, Hillary Clinton’s campaign released their plan for addressing mental health care in the United States. The plan calls for a full integration of...

The norm in science is that there is free access to the data underpinning experiments. If free access is denied; it’s not science. In the case of branded pharmaceuticals, we do not even know what trials have been done. What is put in the public domain is not data. The selected highlights of a football game and the comments of the pundits afterwards don't change the score. The selected highlights of pharma studies and the comments of pundits routinely change the score.

New study investigates the acceptability of a phenomenologically informed, manual-based art therapy for clients diagnosed with moderate to severe depression.

A new article examines the implications of relative age on the ADHD diagnosis.

-Vox interviews the author of the most read article in the history of PLoS Medicine.

Report from June of 2000 by the British Psychological Society Recent Advances In Understanding Mental Illness and Psychotic Experiences              ...