Tag: child development

A new study in Frontiers of Pharmacology finds that antidepressant use during pregnancy is linked to reduced motor skills in children at 2 years...

For years I had hoped that psychiatry would free itself from the psychoanalytic doctrine, and when my wish finally came true, my profession went from the frying pan to the fire. My main goal, currently, is to convince professionals as well as the public that most child psychiatric problems can be handled effectively without medication.

Researchers at Duke University who studied 183 adolescents for three years found that increased depression associated with poverty may be mediated by epigenetic changes in DNA. The...

The March 3^rd, 2016 edition of the Wall Street Journal featured an article by past President of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) Jeffrey Lieberman and his colleague, computational neuroscientist Ogi Ogas. The article was entitled “Genetics and Mental Illness—Let’s Not Get Carried Away.” In their piece, the authors started by expressing the belief that a recent study identified a gene that causes schizophrenia, and then discussed whether it is desirable or possible to remove allegedly pathological genes in the interest of creating a future “mentally perfect society.” The authors of the article, like many previous textbook authors, seem unfamiliar with the questionable “evidence” put forward by psychiatry as proof that its disorders are “highly heritable” In fact, DSM-5 Task Force Chair David Kupfer admitted that “we’re still waiting” for the discovery of “biological and genetic markers” for psychiatric disorders.

A new NIH-funded study suggests that children from low-income environments are more likely to have neurological impairments. The researchers claim that these neurodevelopmental issues are “distinct from the risk of cognitive and emotional delays known to accompany early-life poverty.”

Boston College Psychologist Peter Gray writes for Aeon about the impact of the gradual erosion of children’s’ play in the United States. “Over the...

“We are consistently seeing sensory, motor, and cognitive issues pop up more and more in later childhood, partly because of inadequate opportunities to move and play at an early age,” writes Angela Hanscom in The Washington Post.