Research

Democratic Presidential nominee, Bernie Sanders, questioned the nominee for FDA commissioner, Robert Califf, during yesterday’s Senate hearing. Sanders remarked that we need a commissioner who will stand up to the pharmaceutical companies and protect American consumers. Of Califf, he added, “with regret, I think that you are not that person.”

MIA contributor, Peter Kinderman, from the University of Liverpool, is teaching a free online course that explores new perspectives on the “nature vs nurture” debate, and how we are affected by life experiences.

The results of epidemiological studies of the prevalence of hallucinations strongly imply that psychosis exists on a spectrum, according to the Scientific American. This suggests “that the standard treatment for a psychotic episode might be due for an overhaul.”

NPR reports on study, published in BMJ, that found computer-assisted therapy to be no more effective than care provided by a primary care doctor. "We do still need the human touch or the human interaction, particularly when people are depressed."

In an open letter to all US presidential candidates published Thursday in the BMJ, a group of global health care experts assert that current research regulations allow drug companies to publish incomplete and misleading results. They ask the candidates to declare whether they support improved transparency measures that would make data on drug studies publically available and open to scrutiny.

"After making an observation and forming a hypothesis as usual, the new third step of the scientific method will now require researchers to embark upon an exhaustive search for corporate or government financing,” the satirical news site the Onion “reports.” “Next, scientists simply modify their study’s goals to align with the vision of potential funders and wait for several months to hear back. At this point—should this step be successful, of course—they can move on to the experimental stage, and then to analysis.”

Infants exposed to SSRIs and benzodiazepines during pregnancy show impaired neurologic functioning in the first month after birth, according to a new study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry. While infants exposed SSRIs alone showed neurobehavioral effects throughout the first month, those exposed to an SSRI and a benzodiazepine had more significant problems.

“My vegetable beds have even buoyed me through more acute stressors, such as my medical internship, my daughter’s departure for college, and a loved one’s cancer treatment,” writes Dr. Daphne Miller. Now neuroscientists are attempting to study the antidepressant effects of soil microbes in hopes of unlocking the secrets of a powerful mood enhancer.

In his reaction to Dr. Makari’s Opinion piece in the ‘Times, entitled Psychiatry’s Mind-Brain Problem, Dr. Nardo articulates why the legacy of NIMH director Thomas Insel is so dangerous. “He may have kept the researchers from spinning off and following some idiosyncratic path, but he did it by forcing them to follow his own idiosyncratic path.”

Different types of child abuse have equivalent psychological effects, according to a study in JAMA Psychiatry. It has previously been assumed that emotional and verbal abuse could have different or less harmful impact on a child’s psychology than physical or sexual abuse, but research now suggests that these forms of abuse can be just as damaging.

Since the time of Freud, the field of psychotherapy has assumed that modalities and techniques were the instruments of change in psychotherapy. But the evidence is mounting that modalities and techniques have relatively little to do with effectiveness; evidence shows that it is the human elements of psychotherapy that are the most potent agents of healing

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.

Researchers recently completed a first of its kind, large-scale international survey of attitudes about mental health and they were surprised by the results. According to their analysis published in this month’s issue of the Journal of Affective Disorders, people in developed countries, like the United States, are more likely to assume that ‘mental illnesses’ are similar to physical illnesses and biological or genetic in origin, but they are also much less likely to think that individuals can overcome these challenges and recover

In the Atlantic, Ed Yong reports that despite the lack of replicability of individual studies, when you get a pool of psychologists “betting on” the reproducibility of a study their predictions are surprisingly accurate. “Which makes me wonder: What's going on with peer review? If people know which results are really not likely to be real, why are they allowing them to be published?”

In an interview with the New Scientist, former NIMH director Dr. Thomas Insel explained his decision to join Google and move to the private...

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?"

From 1999 to 2012 the percentage of Americans on antidepressants increased from 6.8% to 13%, according to a report published this week by the...

The German news agency DW features a video report on whether cannabidiol, an active substance derived from marijuana, can help relieve the symptoms of schizophrenia.

New York Times columnist, Nicholas Kristof, relates the story of Andrew Francesco, a boy who began taking Ritalin at age five and died from complications with Seroquel when he was fifteen. His father, a former pharmaceutical industry executive, reveals the industry’s greed in his memoir “Overmedicated and Undertreated.” Now the industry is pushing for a first-amendment right to market its drugs for off-label uses.

The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) is increasingly shifting its research emphasis toward attempting to uncover biomarkers for “mental diseases,” which may have dramatic consequences for research and training in clinical psychology. In an article to be published in next month’s Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, Marvin Goldfried outlines how the shift in funding priorities for psychological research is tied to the needs of pharmaceutical companies and the biological model in psychiatry.

Two companies have committed to FDA review for video games that they claim can be used to treat “ADHD,” but many scientists remain skeptical. “At the annual meeting of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry on Wednesday, Akili Interactive Labs presented data from a pilot study of its video game, Project: EVO, that showed some positive results in children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).”

In 2014, then National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) director, Thomas Insel, speculated that ketamine “might be the most important breakthrough in antidepressant treatment in decades.” A recent review of the research suggests that while ketamine may produce a rapid short-term improvement in depression, the effect is short-lived and the potential for addiction and dependence warrants considerable caution.

At Alternet, Jay Syrmopoulos of The Free Thought Project discusses new research on the use of medical marijuana as a treatment for ADHD within the context of the ongoing debate over the validity of the ADHD diagnosis.

I was a psychiatrist who participated in the Recovery After an Initial Schizophrenia Episode Early Treatment Program (RAISE ETP). Although I welcomed the positive headlines that heralded the study's results, the reports left me with mixed feelings. What happened to render the notion that talking to people about their experiences and helping them find jobs or go back to school is something novel?

A new study on the depression symptoms of over three-thousand patients challenges the criteria used for diagnosing major depression with the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5). Current diagnostic systems are based on an assumption that the symptoms of depression point to a common underlying “illness," but research suggests that this framework may be outdated and oversimplified.