Unregulated Troubled Teen Industry Still Profiting
The Fix reviews the past and present of the estimated $2 billion/year industry of trying to "improve" the behaviors and attitudes of "troubled teens."
Adolescence...
Medscape Reports on Survey Exploring Physicians’ Thoughts on Ethics
Medscape surveyed 21,000 physicians on a wide range of ethical issues, and provides slides summarizing their answers.
A small sampling:
"Would you ever perform a procedure...
Head Movements Have Been Producing Consistent Bias in Brain Scans
A new study has shown that brain scans have an inherent bias towards making people with movement disorders seem to have less grey matter, writes Neuroskeptic in Discover. The findings, he writes, may be significant with respect to studies involving brain scans of people taking psychiatric drugs that either induce or reduce movement.
Paying Doctors to Diagnose More Depression is Unethical
It is "unethical" for the British government to establish expected rates of depression and to pay doctors per diagnosis to increase the diagnosing of...
Psychiatrists Discuss Psychiatry’s Poor Public Image and What to Do About It
The January 2015 issue of Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica has a section of freely available articles discussing the public image of psychiatry from a variety...
New Form of Mice Experiment Reveals Antidepressant’s Dangers Earlier
Scientists from the University of Utah say they have discovered a new way of doing mice experiments that more sensitively and quickly reveals negative...
Abstracts and Academic Press Releases Mislead Journalists and Public
In Bad Science and in the British Medical Journal, Ben Goldacre discusses a recent BMJ study that found a strong tendency for abstracts and...
The Truth About Antidepressant Research: An Invitation to Dialogue
The Finnish Psychological Association held a meeting in Helsinki on 1 Sept 2014 titled “Mental Health and Medicalization.” I spoke at the meeting and four days later I sent a letter to another speaker, psychiatrist Erkki Isometsä. Professor Isometsä replied: “I will respond to it in detail within a few days..." As "Open Dialogue" is essential in science, I have published my letter to Isometsä here as well as on my own website, although I didn’t succeed in starting a dialogue.
Interview with Gary Greenberg: The DSM is the Key to the Health Care Treasury
BrainBlogger has an interview with Gary Greenberg, psychotherapist and author of The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry. "The (Diagnostic...
Do Insurance Companies Profit from Rising Drug Costs?
Many insurance companies have little interest in slowing the rise of inappropriate over-prescribing of pharmaceutical drugs, according to a study in Health Policy. That's...
Can Psychiatrist and Psychologist Court Experts Be Trusted on Memory Science, Round Two
The British Psychological Society Research Digest weighs in on a study previously reported in Mad in America, showing that psychologist and psychiatrist expert court...
Prominent Patient Safety Advocate Was Taking Kickbacks from Pharma
ProPublica revisits the story of Dr. Chuck Denham, the previous editor of the Journal of Patient Safety and former "co-chairman of a committee that...
Interview with Peter Gøtzsche: How Psychiatry Has Gone Astray
Dr. McDougall's Health and Medical Center has posted a three-part interview with MIA Foreign Correspondent Peter Gøtzsche, author of the book Deadly Medicines and...
“Pay $1000 to criticize a bad ‘blood test for depression’ article?”
In the PLOS Blog Mind the Brain, James Coyne recounts how he wanted to participate in post-publication peer review surrounding the "bad science" in...
Psychologists “Devised” and Played “Central Role” in CIA Torture Program
Professional psychologists designed most of the main techniques and strategies and played ongoing, active, central roles in the CIA's torture of people it was...
Psychiatrist Discovers Who Was Secretly Paying the Psychiatrists Who Mocked Her
Young psychiatrist Jean Kim argues that psychiatrists need to reflect more on the morality of their work, then gets "laughed out of the room"...
Sunshine Act Could Make Pharma Target Other Groups Over Doctors
More action will be required if the public hopes to benefit from the new legislation requiring doctors to disclose the money and gifts they've...
Lax Online Security Makes Hacking Your Way to Scientific Prominence Easy
How easy is it to gain access to some of the biggest online hosts of academic research journals in the world, and then start...
Nurse with Secret Recordings Exposes More about University of Minnesota Research Scandal
A senior nurse who has been involved for 22 years with the University of Minnesota's psychiatric research program is accusing the university of a...
NIMH Director Insel Proposes Solutions to Lack of Reproducibility in Research
National Institute of Mental Health Director Thomas Insel laments the lack of reproducibility in such a large majority of mental health-related research. He describes...
“Failed Replications: A Reality Check for Neuroscience?”
In Discover, Neuroskeptic discusses a new study that "attempted to replicate five different papers which, together, reported 17 distinct positive results in the form...
Two Canadian Sources of Independent Health & Mental Health Research Shut Down
The Canadian Women's Health Network (CWHN), for two decades a major source of critical, independent research and information on women's health and mental health,...
Lancet Editorial Argues for Better Science in Mental Health
An editorial in the Lancet Psychiatry suggests that mental health professionals rely more on intuition and "good intentions" than "good science," and that needs...
Previously Hidden Data Shows Anti-flu Drug Linked to Psychosis and Suicides
"(A)t least 70 people have died, many of them by suicide, after Tamiflu-induced episodes," reports Newsweek, in an article about the popular anti-flu drug...
California Foster Care Physicians Taking Double the Average in Pharma Money
Drug companies spent over $14 million from 2010 to 2013 to "woo" California doctors who specialize in treating foster children, according to part three...
