Psychiatric "Spin"

In January of this year, Steven Hyman MD, former Director of NIMH and currently a leading psychiatric researcher at MIT and Harvard, published Revitalizing Psychiatric Therapeutics in Neuropsychopharmacology. The article is in the journal’s commentary section and is essentially an opinion piece. Here’s Dr. Hyman’s summary: "Despite high prevalence and enormous unmet medical need, the pharmaceutical industry has recently de-emphasized neuropsychiatric disorders as 'too difficult' a challenge to warrant major investment. Here I describe major obstacles to drug discovery and development including a lack of new molecular targets, shortcomings of current animal models, and the lack of biomarkers for clinical trials. My major focus, however, is on new technologies and scientific approaches to neuropsychiatric disorders that give promise for revitalizing therapeutics and may thus answer industry's concerns." ...

Psychiatric News is the APA’s online bulletin. On Jan 15, it ran an article by Vabren Watts (an APA staff writer). The article is called APA Gives Schizophrenia Research Capitol Hill Spotlight. It is reported in the article that on December 12, 2013, the APA, together with the Congressional Neuroscience Caucus and the American Brain Coalition, made a joint presentation to legislators and their staffs on ...

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: ...

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. ...

BACKGROUND On December 23, I wrote a post called DSM-5 - Dimensional Diagnoses - More Conflicts of Interest? In the article I sketched out the role of David Kupfer, MD, in promoting the concept of dimensional assessment in DSM-5, and I speculated that at least part of his motivation in this regard might have stemmed from the fact that he is a major shareholder in a company that is developing a computerized assessment instrument. I ended the piece with a general criticism of psychiatry: ...

On January 3, on CommonHealth I saw the following headline: A Phrase To Renounce For 2014: ‘The Mentally Ill’, written by Carey Goldberg. My first impression was that the author was debunking the concept of mental illness, but I was sadly mistaken. The theme of the article was the so-called person-first terminology that has been promoted by various bodies and agencies since about the mid-eighties. The idea is that one shouldn’t say “a developmentally disabled child.” Instead, one should say “a child with a developmental disability.” Similarly, a person should not be referred to as an “alcoholic,” but rather as a “person with alcoholism.” And so on. The idea is to avoid giving the impression that the individual is to be defined by the presence of a disabling condition. The individual is first and foremost a person, and the problem or disability is semantically tacked on to indicate that it is a quality of the person rather than the defining feature. ...

Jeffrey Lieberman, MD, is the President of the APA, and every two weeks or so he writes psychiatric propaganda articles on Psychiatric News (the APA’s online bulletin). On December 26, his piece was titled APA Successful in Attaining Higher Work Values for Psychiatry. Here’s the first paragraph: "In an ideal world, value and price would be closely aligned. This alignment doesn’t occur, however, when the value of a service or good isn’t understood. One only has to look at the huge disparity between the salaries of teachers compared with entertainers and sports figures to appreciate this incongruity; or between compensation in the financial-services industry and medicine. For too long, this has especially been the case for psychiatric services. Mental illness is a health care disparity, and mental health care has been stigmatized and undervalued, as have been the physicians who provide it. The result has been inappropriately low reimbursement rates for psychiatric treatment and a corresponding lack of access to mental health care for too many patients." ...

Jeffrey Lieberman, MD, President of the APA and Chair of Psychiatry at Columbia University, published a post on November 26 on Psychiatric News. The article is called Training the Psychiatrists of the Future, and is co-authored by Richard Summers, MD. Dr. Summers is a Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. Drs. Lieberman and Summers open by telling us that psychiatrists’ roles “…are changing and will continue to change.” That sounds great, but don’t expect too much. There will still, they tell us, be a need for: ...

ANOTHER VIDEO FROM DR. LIEBERMAN On October 28, Jeffrey Lieberman, MD, President of the APA, made another video. This one is titled An Important Look at Mortality in Mental Illness: A Decade of Data on Psychotropic Drugs, and was made for Medscape. You can see the transcript at the same site. Medscape is a web resource for medical practitioners. The video is Dr. Lieberman’s commentary on an article that appeared in JAMA Psychiatry online on August 28: Comparative Mortality Risk in Adult Patients With Schizophrenia, Depression, Bipolar Disorder, Anxiety Disorders, and Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder Participating in Psychopharmacology Clinical Trials, by Arif Khan, MD, et al. ...