INTRODUCTION On September 9, 2020, Jonathan Stea, PhD, Tyler Black, MD, and Joseph Pierre, MD, published a piece on MedPage Today. The article is titled Why Anti-Psychiatry Now Fails and Harms. Dr. Stea is a clinical psychologist and adjunct assistant professor at the University of Calgary. Dr. Black is the psychiatric medical director of British Columbia Children’s Hospital. He is also a clinical instructor in psychiatry at the University of British Columbia. ...
Ronald Pies, MD, and Mark Ruffalo, D Psa, were busy in June. They published two papers in defense of psychiatry: What Is Meant by a Psychiatric Diagnosis? (“Psychiatric diagnoses are not merely descriptive; they reflect genuine illness”); and Psychiatric Diagnosis 2.0: The Myth of the Symptom Checklist (“More on the meaning of psychiatric diagnosis”). Both were published by Psychology Today. Here’s their opening to the first paper: "It has become fashionable for some in the social sciences to assert that psychiatric diagnoses represent 'constructs' and not genuine disorders or diseases. During a recent Twitter exchange, one of us (Mark Ruffalo) was pointed to an article published here on Psychology Today in 2019 by the psychoanalytic psychologist Jonathan Shedler, Ph.D., titled, 'A Psychiatric Diagnosis Is Not a Disease.'" ...
On March 4, 2020, the very eminent Allen Frances, MD, published an article in Aeon, which according to its About page is “a digital magazine, publishing some of the most profound and provocative thinking on the web. We ask the big questions and find the freshest, most original answers, provided by leading thinkers on science, philosophy, society and the arts.” The article is called The lure of ‘cool’ brain research is stifling psychotherapy. The central theme is that prior to 1990, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) “appreciated the need for a well-rounded approach [to mental health] and maintained a balanced research budget that covered an extraordinarily wide range of topics and techniques.” However, since 1990, the opening year of the Decade of the Brain, the NIMH has “increasingly narrowed its focus almost exclusively to brain biology – leaving out everything else that makes us human, both in sickness and in health.” ...
On May 16, 2018, the prestigious and venerable psychiatrist Allen Frances, MD, gave an interview to Christiane Amanpour on CNN. You can see the video here. It’s titled How Antidepressant Withdrawal “Can Trap People”. Here’s how the interview opened: CA: "So you know, I just wanted to start by saying that who knew that antidepressants were addictive. It's not what you associate with things like antidepressants. You think of pain-killers, obviously, and drugs and alcohol, and cigarettes." ...
In the May 2018 issue of Current Psychiatry, there’s an editorial by Henry Nasrallah, MD. Dr. Nasrallah is a highly renowned psychiatrist, and is Editor-in-Chief of the journal. He is also chair of the St. Louis University Department of Psychiatry. Here’s the opening paragraph of the article. "As the end of the academic year approaches, I always think of one last message to send to the freshly minted psychiatrists who will complete their 4 years of post-MD training. This year, I thought of emphasizing the principles of psychiatric practice, which the graduates will deliver for the next 4 to 5 decades of their professional lives. Those essential principles are coded in the DNA of psychiatric practice, just as the construction of all organs in the human body is coded within the DNA of the 22,000 genes that comprise our 23 chromosomes." ...
On September 4, 2017, the very eminent and prestigious psychiatrist Ronald Pies, MD, published an article on Psychiatric Times. The piece is titled: Hearing Voices and Psychiatry’s (Real) Medical Model. Dr. Pies is Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of Psychiatric Times and a professor of psychiatry at SUNY and Tufts. He has written extensively on psychiatric and other matters, and has acquired a reputation for scholarship and erudition. His credibility, however, took a considerable knock in 2014 when, in a Medscape article he asserted that the chemical imbalance theory of depression was just a kind of urban legend that was never seriously promoted by psychiatry. This assertion, which was widely disputed, added a whole new dimension to the concept of the ivory tower. But it also provided an important insight into Dr. Pies’ primary position: that psychiatry is inherently benign, scientifically founded, and helpful, and that all suggestions to the contrary are logically flawed, factually mistaken, or both. The present “Hearing Voices…” piece is in this same vein. ...
Or, how to make a silk purse from a sow’s ear. INTRODUCTION In November 2017, the British Journal of Psychiatry published a guest editorial titled Shrink rethink: rebranding psychiatry. The authors are Scottish psychiatrists Jim Crabb, MD and Neil Masson, MD, and Lee Barber, an advertising and marketing strategist. Both Drs. Crabb and Masson practice general adult psychiatry and also lecture in psychiatry at the University of Glasgow. They are both members of the Scottish Teaching and Recruitment Group (STARG), which “looks at ways of improving recruitment into psychiatry.” ...
INTRODUCTION On May 5, 2017, Donald Goff, MD and seven other psychiatrists, including the very eminent Jeffrey Lieberman, MD, published an article in the American Journal of Psychiatry. The title is: The Long-Term Effects of Antipsychotic Medication on Clinical Course in Schizophrenia. Here’s the abstract: "Concerns have been raised that treatment with antipsychotic medication might adversely affect long-term outcomes for people with schizophrenia. The evidence cited for these concerns includes the association of antipsychotic treatment with brain volume reduction and with dopamine receptor sensitization, which might make patients vulnerable to relapse and illness progression. An international group of experts was convened to examine findings from clinical and basic research relevant to these concerns. Little evidence was found to support a negative long-term effect of initial or maintenance antipsychotic treatment on outcomes, compared with withholding treatment. Randomized controlled trials strongly support the efficacy of antipsychotics for the acute treatment of psychosis and prevention of relapse; correlational evidence suggests that early intervention and reduced duration of untreated psychosis might improve longer-term outcomes. Strategies for treatment discontinuation or alternative nonpharmacologic treatment approaches may benefit a subgroup of patients but may be associated with incremental risk of relapse and require further study, including the development of biomarkers that will enable a precision medicine approach to individualized treatment." ...
INTRODUCTION On August 8, 2013, the eminent psychiatrist Nassir Ghaemi, MD, MPH, published an article on Medscape. The title of the piece is The Psychological Fallacy in Psychiatry. The article is almost four years old. Ordinarily I don’t discuss material this dated, but the content of this article is particularly important, and worthy of discussion, belated as it is. NASSIR GHAEMI’S BIO According to his bio, Dr. Ghaemi: "…is an academic psychiatrist specializing in mood illnesses, depression and bipolar illness, and Editor of a monthly newsletter, The Psychiatry Letter (www.psychiatryletter.org). ...
On December 25, 2016, the Baltimore Sun published an excellent article titled Drug companies prey on children, by Patrick D. Hahn, PhD. Dr. Hahn is an affiliate professor of biology at Loyola University, Maryland. Here are some quotes: "I recently attended Youth Mental Health First Aid Training at a local public school. It was an eye-opening experience." "Youth Mental Health First Aid Training, sponsored by the National Council for Behavioral Health, is intended to enable teachers, parents and others in contact with young people to identify potential 'mental illnesses' in order to facilitate early detection and treatment by our mental health care system. My fellow attendees were surprisingly open about their own experiences with that system. One mentioned that her son became manic after being diagnosed for ADHD. Another said that both she and her roommate became bipolar after being diagnosed for depression. Neither our facilitators nor anyone else present pointed out that mania and bipolar disorder are toxic effects of medications commonly prescribed for ADHD and depression." ...