In DSM-5 – Dimensional Diagnoses – More Conflicts of Interest? which I posted on December 23, 2013, I drew attention to the fact that David Kupfer, MD, in his position as head of the DSM-5 Task Force, was vigorously promoting a dimensional model of assessment while at the same time was positioning himself to benefit financially if such a system were to be adopted by psychiatry generally. ...
Jeffrey Lieberman, MD, President of the APA, has expressed concern about the rise in the number of people being assigned a “diagnosis” of ADHD. He has put up a video on Medscape, Explaining the Rise in ADHD. There is a transcript with the video. Dr. Lieberman is responding to a December 14, 2013, New York Times article The Selling of Attention Deficit Disorder, by Alan Schwarz, and a December 18 editorial in the same paper titled An Epidemic of Attention Deficit Disorder. ...
The Royal College of Psychiatry is the UK equivalent of the American Psychiatric Association. On January 14, they announced that Professor Simon Wessely has been elected as their next president, and that he will take office on June 26, 2014. Dr. Wessely is an eminent psychiatrist who has been knighted by the Queen for his services to psychiatric medicine. In their press release, the Royal College reported that Dr. Wessely’s priorities as President will be: ...
There’s a new study in the January 2014 issue of the BMJ: Grigoriadis et al, Prenatal exposure to antidepressants and persistent pulmonary hypertension of the newborn: systematic review and meta-analysis. Thanks to Nanu Grewal for the link. PPHN is a relatively rare condition. The authors report that the estimated prevalence is about 1.9 per 1000 live births. The disease is essentially a failure of the newborn’s circulatory system to switch from oxygen supply via the placental blood, to oxygen supply via the baby’s own lungs. The condition is usually diagnosed at birth or shortly thereafter. Symptoms include: rapid and difficult breathing, fast heart rate, and blue skin color. PPHN is a serious condition. A 2010 article by Robin Steinhorn, MD, states: ...
January 21 (tomorrow) is National Hugging Day here in the US, and newspapers and other media outlets will be encouraging us to distribute hugs generously and indiscriminately. We will be “educated” on the benefits of hugs, not only to our emotional well-being, but to our health and welfare generally. In my local paper, I came across a mindbodygreen.com article on this topic. Here are some quotes: "Hugs strengthen the immune system. The gentle pressure on the sternum and the emotional charge this creates activates the Solar Plexus Chakra. This stimulates the thymus gland, which regulates and balances the body's production of white blood cell" ...
Joel Yager, MD, is a Professor of Psychiatry, University of Colorado at Denver School of Medicine. He started his career as a US Army psychiatrist in 1969, and has held a wide range of clinical and teaching positions in the intervening years. He has received numerous awards, including lifetime achievement awards from the National Eating Disorders Association (2008) and from the Association for Academic Psychiatry (2009). He has published more than 200 peer-reviewed papers, many of which are concerned with the training of psychiatrists. ...
There’s a debate on this topic scheduled for 12:00 p.m., March 11, 2014, at Wasserstein Hall, Cambridge, Massachusetts. The event is free, and open to the public. The debate is sponsored by the Petrie-Flom Center For Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. This is the same group that produced the recent symposium on Institutional Corruption and Pharmaceutical Policy. The debate will be moderated by I. Glen Cohen, Professor Law at Harvard and Co-Director of the Petri-Flom Center. ...
There was an interesting article, Antidepressant regulations tightened following suicide, in the Copenhagen Post on January 7. Thanks to Mad in America for the link. It is reported that Danilo Terrida, aged 20, committed suicide in 2011 "…eleven days after he was prescribed antidepressants following an eight-minute-long conversation with a doctor." The doctor has been deemed responsible for the suicide by the National Agency for Patients' Rights and Complaints. According to its website: "The National Agency for Patients' Rights and Complaints functions as a single point of access for patients who wish to complain about the professional treatment in the Danish health service." ...
On January 7, Maria Bradshaw, co-founder of CASPER, published an interesting article on Mad in America. It’s called Prescribing Rights for Psychologists, and it suggests that psychology as a profession may be falling into some of the same errors that enmire psychiatry. Maria makes some very compelling points, and focuses particularly on the fact that psychologists have won prescribing rights in a number of jurisdictions, and are engaged in an ongoing effort to expand this aspect of their work. ...
A couple of months ago I wrote an article concerning ECT which generated some controversy. One of the issues that came up was the relationship between biological explanations of human activity and more global explanations, which, for want of a better term, I’ll call person-centered explanations. Any human activity can be viewed from different levels of abstraction. Suppose, for instance, that I am sitting in my living room reading a book. Then I put the book down, stand up, and go outside. If the question were to be asked: why did he put the book down and go outside? A wide range of perspectives and answers are possible. One could, for instance, focus on the fact that I am a biological organism, and one could develop a detailed and comprehensive flow sheet of every muscle movement, every heartbeat, every sensory input, neural impulse etc., that had occurred from the moment that I put the book down until I was standing outside. Such an account might be more or less detailed. There would, of course, be physical limitations on the amount of information of this sort that is attainable, but from a theoretical point of view, one could compile a detailed, complete, and accurate biological account of the actions in question. And such an account would be a valid response to the question: why did he put the book down and go outside. ...