Research

ServiceNet, a mental health and human service agency in western Massachusetts, received a three year, two million dollar grant to launch a program designed to support young adults who have recently experienced their first episode of psychosis. The Prevention and Recovery Early Psychosis (PREP) program is funded by the Massachusetts department of mental health and is designed to treat psychosis as a symptom, not an illness, resulting from other illnesses, substance abuse, trauma, or extreme stress.

A discussion of the role of epistemic injustice in the experiences of patients diagnosed with psychiatric disorders.

From The Irish Times: In recent experiments, scientists have identified "unconscious determinants" in the brain that help predict the decisions of research subjects. However, philosophers argue...

Researchers in Norway and Denmark found that in a sample of 186 first-episode psychosis patients followed for 10 years, flat affect was more "fluctuant"...

Johnson & Johnson has agreed to settle Texas' lawsuit for the company's fraudulent marketing of Risperdal. The is the first time J&J has settled...

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.

“Live, healthy babies are the most common outcome following the use of antipsychotic medication in pregnancy,” conclude Australian researchers in a study that was...

From The Boston Globe: Scientists' focus on biology and genetics research downplays the role of socioeconomic factors in causing distress and health problems. "Science is threatening a new era of...

Even as overall female authorship increases, imbalances remain in high-impact psychiatry and clinical psychology journals.

A new review, published in BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine, concludes that antidepressants should not be used as the risks outweigh evidence for benefits.

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...

What does it tell us about the current state of psychiatry when some of the biggest names in the psychiatric establishment are now distancing themselves from psychiatry’s diagnostic system and its treatments? The institution of psychiatry has become corrupted by Big Pharma to such a degree that it has become, even to the mainstream media, so obviously ridiculous and so dangerously insane that politically astute psychiatrists are trying to separate themselves from their institution.

Scientists at the Yale Collaboration for Research Integrity and Transparency (CRIT) published a new policy paper this month criticizing the current state of biomedical research and calling for improved transparency in research methods.

The Attorney General of Louisiana has filed suit against Pfizer, Inc. for concealing "serious issues" regarding Zoloft's efficacy. Citing a "deliberate, systematic practice" of...

Steven Reisner and Stephen Soldz, writing for Counter Punch, take on those who have criticized the Hoffman Report, which found that the APA had actively colluded in the US Torture program. “They have not credibly refuted these core findings of Hoffman’s seven-month investigation, nor have they even attempted to do so.”

From HealthNewsReview.org: While researchers are usually required to disclose their conflicts of interest in medical journals, media outlets do not often require journalists to disclose...

Legislation in the U.K. that empowers psychiatrists to impose treatment  on patients has lost the support of one of its key advocates. "The evidence is...

A new study in JAMA reveals that, on average, 25% of beginning physicians meet the diagnostic criteria for major depression. In an accompanying editorial, Dr. Thomas Schwenk, added: "Everybody asks me, because of some of my prior studies, should we have more intense work in diagnosing depression in students? Of course, the answer is 'yes,' but how do you go about that without further stigmatizing them, further labeling them, further singling them out to even greater stigma? It's not just an issue of, 'Let's make better diagnoses and let's provide better treatment'; it’s more complicated than that."

In the first study of its kind, researchers from Finland found the “most definitive evidence to date” that smoking during pregnancy is associated with the eventual diagnosis of schizophrenia in offspring. After controlling for other potential variables, the study, published ahead of print in The American Journal of Psychiatry, revealed a 38% increased odds of developing symptoms diagnosed as schizophrenia in young adults who were exposed to high levels of nicotine in utero.

A study published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience proposes a new model for the treatment of adolescents diagnosed with major depressive disorder (MDD).

From Tidsskriftet: Over the past three decades, there has been a dramatic increase in the diagnosis and pharmacological treatment of ADHD. Recent systematic reviews reveal...

From AlterNet: The increasing pace at which the FDA is approving new drugs can lead to significant risks to patient safety. Drugs that once would have...

A study of 40 patients with schizophrenia diagnoses and 40 patients with dissociative identity disorder (DID) found that "neither phenomenological definitions of dissociation nor...

In this blog for Statistical Modeling, Causal Interference, and Social Science, Andrew Gelman critiques the Association of Psychological Science's upcoming convention.

The UK Times reports that pharmaceutical companies are actively lobbying to limit the release of clinical trial data to the public. Rather than limiting results and data to medical journals, new transparency initiatives are pushing for making the information publically available. The push for transparency comes in the wake of the reanalysis of the Study 329 data on paroxetine (marketed as Seroxat and Paxil), which found that the industry study had misconstrued its results.