A Behavioral Approach to Mental Disorders

On September 21, the Guardian/Observer (UK) ran an online article by Vaughan Bell titled Changing brains: why neuroscience is ending the Prozac era. Thanks to Paul Mace on Twitter for the link. The gist of the article is that although the use of psycho-pharmaceutical products is at an all-time high and is still rising in most parts of the world, the psychiatric promise of drug-induced happiness may be at, or close to, its peak. ...

On January 17, 2013, Peter Kinderman, PhD, Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Liverpool, wrote an article titled Grief and Anxiety are not mental illnesses. On February 4, 2013, Steven Novella, MD, wrote a critique of Dr. Kinderman’s article. On February 20, I wrote a critique of Dr. Novella’s article. And finally, on September 17, Dr. Novella wrote More On Mental Illness Denial and How Not to Argue, a critique of my critique. ...

If you haven’t seen Jon Rappoport’s blog, please take a look. Here are two quotes from his September 22 post, Psychiatry targets college students for destruction: "The concept called 'mental disorder' is a sales pitch backed up by extraordinary PR, money, academic gibberish, and government-granted official status." "People need to wake up to the fact that the whole panoply of human suffering has been co-opted, taken over, redefined, re-translated into a lexicon of pseudoscience." ...

Earlier this month, the American Journal of Psychiatry published an article by Yen-Po Wang, M.D., et al, titled Short-Term Use of Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors and Risk of Upper Gastrointestinal Bleeding. [Thanks to Mad in America for the link] The research was conducted in Taiwan. The authors studied the records of 5,377 psychiatric inpatients with gastrointestinal bleeding between 1998 and 2009. Study subjects served as their own controls, i.e. the incidence of bleeding in the period following the antidepressant prescription was compared with the incidence of bleeding during a period when they were not taking antidepressants. ...

Those of us on this side of the psychiatric debate have long maintained that there is a link between the so-called antidepressant drugs and the mass murders that have become an increasingly common feature of American society in recent decades. The call for a formal investigation of this link, however, has been consistently resisted, and instead there has been a well-orchestrated medical campaign clamoring for more mental health services and more active outreach and prevention services. As an example, see Jeffrey Lieberman’s guest post on Everyday Health, In the Wake of the Navy Yard Shooting: A Way Forward. ...

There’s an interesting article on Mad in America dated September 17, 2013. It’s titled Psychiatry & Suicide Prevention: A 30-year Failed Experiment, and was written by Maria Bradshaw. Maria Bradshaw is the founder of CASPER, an organization that rejects the medical model of suicide prevention in favor of a sociological model. Ms. Bradshaw founded CASPER after her son’s antidepressant-induced suicide. Here’s the gist of Ms. Bradshaw article: Roger Mulder, MD, is head of psychiatry at Otago University in New Zealand. For at least the last 15 years, he has supported the notion of psychiatric intervention as a suicide-prevention measure. For instance, here’s something he wrote in 2008 in an article published in Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica: ...

There’s an article in the current issue of Clinical Toxicology, titled Drug-induced seizures in children and adolescents presenting for emergency care: Current and emerging trends, authored by Y. Finkelstein et al. The authors conducted an observational study, on 37 sites, of all pediatric Emergency Room reports which included a chemical or drug-induced seizure and required a toxicology consultation between April 2010 and March 2012. RESULTS "Antidepressants were the most commonly identified agents ingested…"(42%). ...

This is an excellent book, published by Pegasus Books earlier this year. The cover blurb says that it is “…scathing about every aspect of psychiatry.” Dr. Davies, who is a practicing therapist in the UK, brings to the subject enormous energy and enthusiasm. He has interviewed Robert Spitzer, Allen Frances, Irving Kirsch, Joanna Moncrieff, Sami Tamimi, Peter Breggin, and many, many others. Some of the points he makes will be familiar to those of us on this side of the debate, but there is an enormous amount of fresh material and insights. The book careens, almost literally, from one psychiatric outrage to the next, and the arguments are supported by appropriate citations. ...

There’s an interesting article on Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience. It’s called Learning from Negative Feedback in Patients with Major Depressive Disorder is Attenuated by SSRI Antidepressants. The researchers evaluated learning ability in three groups: medication-naïve individuals who met the criteria for Major Depressive Disorder individuals who met the criteria for MDD and were receiving the SSRI paroxetine (Paxil) "healthy" controls All subjects were given a learning task that allowed the researchers to distinguish learning from positive feedback versus learning from negative feedback The results were: ...

There’s an interesting article by J. Sareen et al on Cambridge Journals Online, September 2013. It’s call Common mental disorder diagnosis and need for treatment are not the same: findings from a population-based survey. Five of the six authors are working at universities in Canada, the sixth at a university in California. [Thanks to Mad in America for the link to the abstract. The full article is, unfortunately, behind a paywall.] ...