Less-impaired Youth Using Antipsychotics with Other Medications More Often
Use of second-generation antipsychotics (SGA) alongside other medications is growing rapidly among youth who are less impaired, according to a study published online in...
Debunking The Latest Gene Study
The researchers suggest that their finding implies a common genetic cause behind five different “disorders.” This is big news! If true, it validates the biomedical view of mental “illness” and suggests that future medical treatments could “cure” these conditions. However, that grand conclusion is not supported by the data.
Specific Early-Life Adversities Lead to Specific Symptoms of Psychosis
Researchers in the U.K. (lead by Richard Bentall) found that specific childhood adversities were significantly associated with specific forms of psychosis in adulthood in...
Pooling Data May Hide Negative Outcomes for Antidepressants
A new study, published in Psychological Medicine, found evidence for a specific type of publication bias distorting the evidence about antidepressant efficacy.
Cymbalta Suicide Suit Settled
Eli Lilly & Co. will pay an undisclosed amount to settle the lawsuit of the parents of a South Dakota boy who committed suicide...
5 Steps to Personalize Deprescribing Practices
Researchers identify simple ways for clinicians to begin deprescribing conversations.
Childhood Adversity Increases Psychosis
Researchers in the U.K. and Netherlands found a nearly 3x greater chance of childhood adversity among patients with psychosis in 36 studies of various...
All Tip, No Iceberg: A New Way to Think About Mental Illness
From The Conversation: The search for a single, identifiable cause underlying each mental disorder has yielded very few useful results. New research suggests that a network...
ADHD Medication Risks Outweigh Benefits in Most Cases
A systematic review of studies of stimulant medications for ADHD has concluded that the drugs should be used as a last resort, in rare...
World Health Organization “Opens the Doors Wide to Corporate Influence”
-Is the World Health Organization moving towards developing tighter ties with corporations through its new "Framework of Engagement with non-State Actors"?
A Memoir of Chronic Fatigue Illustrates the Failures of Research
From The New Yorker: In her new book Through the Shadowlands, Julie Rehmeyer chronicles her struggles with chronic fatigue syndrome, or systemic exertion intolerance disease (S.E.I.D.),...
More Than Half of 4th-Year Medical Students and Residents Receive Drug Company Gifts
A study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine asked 1,620 medical students and 739 residents doctors-in-training across the U.S. about their contacts...
Expanding Mental Health Care Beyond Adding More Psychiatrists
From STAT: Although many people believe that we need to train more psychiatrists in order to increase access to mental health care, there is no...
Prenatal Exposure to Psychotropic Medication Linked to Long Term Cognitive Impairment
School aged children exposed prenatally to psychotropic medication show poorer outcomes in cognitive ability.
Experts Raise Alarm on Influence of Medical Device Salespeople
From Medscape: “Despite their role, device reps have received little scrutiny, in sharp contrast to drug salespeople, whose role has been the subject of...
Are Psychiatric Experiments on Primates Ethical — Or Even Truly Useful?
Pediatric psychiatrist Sujartha Ramakrishna describes a planned University of Wisconsin psychiatric experiment "to discover new therapies by dissecting and analyzing the brains of baby...
The Upside of Sadness
Being morose provides benefits, according to research suggesting that detail-oriented, analytical thinking styles can accompany periods of sadness. Science News reports that people experiencing...
When Data Doesn’t Mean What We Think It Does
From The New York Times: In recent years, social scientists have become increasingly concerned about the "replication crisis," i.e. the dearth of reproducible research results....
Our Health Care System Still Massively Overtreats Patients
From the Center for Health Journalism: It is a commonly held belief that more medical care is always better; however, overtreatment can be harmful to...
Benzodiazepines May Double the Risk of Pneumonia
An editorial in Thorax reviews the evidence for an association between mental illness, benzodiazepine use, and pneumonia. The authors find an equally augmented rate...
“Unfortunate experiments” in New Zealand and Minnesota
Carl Elliott writes on the discrepancy between New Zealand's response to a research scandal - which lead to a national debate and dramatic reforms - and the silence following clinical trial scandals in the U.S.
Lack of Sleep May be a Cause of Mental Health Conditions
From Live Science: A new study published in The Lancet Psychiatry found that participants who completed an online cognitive behavioral therapy program specifically for insomnia experienced...
Mad Flies and Bad Science
Tension mounts across the ideological divide as D-Day (DSM-5 Day) approaches. The APA has powerful allies on its side. President Obama has just launched Decade of the Brain 2 with the announcement two weeks ago that heralds the arrival of BRAIN ( Brain Research through Advances in Innovative Neurotechnologies). If that’s not enough, those who believe that science will ultimately explain madness can always rely on the media to fawn at their feet.
Minimal Empirical Support for Antidepressant Treatment in Young People
Researchers from Australia reviewed the existing literature for good-quality evidence of effective prevention and treatment of depression in young people. Prevention research was dominated...
Psychiatrists Argue For More Attention to Iatrogenic Harms
Psychiatrists argue that current practice fails to account for the interaction of biological, psychosocial and iatrogenic factors.
