Research

A team of Egyptian researchers found, in a sample of 74 outpatients, a relationship between trauma and first-episode schizophrenia, with a "mediating" role of...

An editorial in Thorax reviews the evidence for an association between mental illness, benzodiazepine use, and pneumonia. The authors find an equally augmented rate...

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.

Today I paid a visit to the Managing Director of Mylan Pharmaceuticals, Lloyd Price. Mylan is the company that manufactured the antidepressant Fluox1 which, according to the NZ government, is the most likely cause of my son's suicide. My dealings with Mylan in the time since Toran died have not been entirely fruitful.

The recent research scandals out of the University of Minnesota’s Department of Psychiatry may be alarming, but they are not new. Back in the 1990s, when the university was working its way towards a crippling probation by the National Institutes of Health (for yet another episode of misconduct (this time in the Department of Surgery), the Department of Psychiatry hosted two spectacular cases of research wrongdoing, both of which resulted in faculty members being disqualified from conducting research by the FDA.

In my recent Alternatives keynote I talked about mental health issues and our unjust prisons, including the shameful racism of the criminal justice system...

The suicide of Dan Markingson at the University of Minnesota has brought notoriety to the CAFÉ study and its site investigators, Stephen Olson and Charles Schulz. But the “corrective action” recently issued by the Minnesota Board of Social Work against the CAFÉ study coordinator, Jean Kenney, has raised another disturbing question.

Ever since critics began asking questions about the death of Dan Markinson in a clinical trial at the University of Minnesota, the General Counsel for the university, Mark Rotenberg, has responded with a uniform message: the case has already been investigated many times, and no wrongdoing has ever been found. That's how Rotenberg responded to my article about the case in Mother Jones, and that's how he responded last week to the news that the Board of Social Work had issued a “corrective action” to the study coordinator for the clinical trial in which Markingson died.

The practice of medicine in our country is being swallowed whole by a snake. The snake started with the poor, the black, the brown; the already disenfranchised of the deep south and inner cities many years ago. It was an easy sell to the better-off taxpayers. Who wants to give up money to take care of poor people?

In the "agreement for corrective action" against CAFE study coordinator Jean Kenney last week, the Board of Social Work cited Kenney's failure to respond to "alarming voicemail messages" from family members of Dan Markingson. Presumably, the Board is referring to a message left by his mother, Mary Weiss, which warned, "Do we have to wait until he kills himself or someone else before anyone else does anything?" The failure of Kenney and Stephen Olson to take the warnings of Mary Weiss seriously has been one of the most disturbing aspects of this case. In a deposition for the lawsuit filed by Weiss, Kenney was questioned about her response. Here is an excerpt. (The initial questions come from Gale Pearson, an attorney for Mary Weiss.)

Following a record-setting spate of settlements, GlaxoSmithKline North America President Dierdre Connelly touts Glaxo's move away from a sales model that encourages the misbehavior...

Researchers from 11 nations in Europe and North America find, in the largest study to date of possible links between genetic markers and antidepressant...

After failing to win a postponement earlier this week, Pfizer settled with the widow of Minnesota man who suicided while using the stop-smoking drug...

The 'Initiative to Reduce the Impact of Schizophrenia" (IRIS) has updated its 1998 guidelines for early intervention in psychosis to state that not all people...

How did the APA talk go? Overall a success-- the audio went viral on the internet, and the talk itself was so crowded we had to move to a larger room -- more than 70 psychiatrists and behavioral healthcare professionals attended. Afterwards many stepped up to shake my hand and congratulate me: I was told by two people I was a gift to the conference, asked to present at a Grand Rounds, encouraged to do a TED talk, thanked for my compassionate response to a question about forced treatment, and invited to do more trainings in the future. I even met several psychiatrists who are Madness Radio listeners. Psychiatry is clearly not a monolithic profession and many in it are beginning to think differently.

"The last four years have seen a 90% increase in the number of serious adverse drug reports received by the Food and Drug Administration," according to a report by the Institute for Safe Medication Practices." Among them, a "signal" that Cymbalta causes "an array of problems such as crying, suicidal ideation, and anger, and other symptoms including effects on appetite and weight gain."

Scientific American explores a crowdfunded approach to researching methamphetamine addiction, suggesting the approach is adaptable to pursuing other questions that are challenged to find...

David Healy "likened psychiatry’s attitude toward its faltering legitimacy to the Vatican’s widely derided response to its child sex abuse scandal by priests —...

Although the global pharmaceutical industry racked up $11 billion in fines in the last three years, "Companies might well view such fines as a...

"A drug that was never meant for kids was illegally marketed to kids," said a lawyer for the plaintiff in opening remarks for the...

1 Boring Old Man reviews the decline in inter-rater reliability from the DSM-II to  the DSM-5. 1 Boring Old Man →

In a study of the Swedish Medical Birth Registry published in the British Medical Journal, researchers identified all 324,510 single children born between 1988...

Jim Gottstein writes in Pharmalot about developments in the mental health rights field, how pharma has contributed (positively or negatively), and how the upcoming...

"In order to expose people to dangerous treatments - and immunosuppresive drugs do carry risks - you need serious evidence to suggest those drugs...

Women who were asked to play a gambling were significantly more likely to keep betting when the stakes increased if they had taken Ritalin...