I’ve recently read a noteworthy article on PLOS One. It’s by Joanne M. Dickson and Nicholas J. Moberly, and it’s called Reduced Specificity of Personal Goals and Explanations for Goal Attainment in Major Depression. It’s a very interesting and detailed paper. The authors, who work at the University of Liverpool and the University of Exeter respectively, asked a group of depressed people and another group of people who were not depressed to list their goals. ...

There’s a very important article on Mad in America. It’s called Does NIMH Follow the Rules of Science? A Startling Study, by Niall McLaren, MD, dated July 9, 2013. Dr. McLaren is an Australian psychiatrist who has relentlessly combed the literature for proof of the fundamental psychiatric claim – “…that a full understanding of the brain will give a full understanding of mental disorder, with no questions unanswered.” He found nothing in the way of proof! ...

Recently on Twitter, Disparity asked for my opinion on the term mid-life crisis, which “…is often treated as a mental health condition.” The term mid-life crisis has no formal meaning in mental health, though as Disparity says, the concept does emerge from time to time. The original meaning of the word crisis was a turning point in an illness. In the past forty of fifty years, the connotation has extended to embrace almost any kind of challenging situation or adverse event. ...

I guess everybody knows by now that Robert Whitaker spoke at the NAMI conference in San Antonio last Saturday (June 29). You can view an outline of his speech, The Case for Selective Use of Antipsychotics here. He spoke about the fact that for people who have been assigned a “diagnosis” of “schizophrenia,” long-term outcomes are better among those who took relatively little of neuroleptic drugs, and worse among those who took relatively more. ...

It is a central theme of this website that psychiatry has done, and continues to do, a great deal of damage to people it claims to help. In my opinion, the damage done by neuroleptic drugs is among the most severe. The increasing use of these products ought to be a huge cause for concern. This is particularly true in that these very toxic drugs are being administered with increasing frequency to children – even to children as young as two years old! ...

BACKGROUND Mad in America ran an article (Reduction/Discontinuation of Antipsychotics Produces Higher Long-Term Recovery) on July 3, describing a piece of research on this topic which had been done in Holland. The original article, by Lex Wunderink, MD PhD et al, was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Psychiatry (JAMA-P). You can see an abstract of the article here, but the full text is behind a pay wall. ...

BACKGROUND I’ve recently read Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche, by Ethan Watters (Free Press, 2010). It’s a great book, the theme of which is that western countries, especially America, are exporting the medicalization of human problems to less developed regions of the world. The new “illnesses” are being avidly promoted as if they had the same kind of reality as pneumonia or cancer, and are being foisted on vulnerable populations, with little regard for their impact on the cultures, ideas, sensitivities, and health of the recipients. ...

The FDA recently approved paroxetine (which in higher doses is marketed as the antidepressant Paxil) as a nonhormonal treatment for hot flashes in menopausal women. The drug will be marketed as Brisdelle. According to a New York Times article F.D.A. Approves a Drug for Hot Flashes, the approval was granted despite the fact that FDA’s own advisory committee voted 10 to 4 last March against approval. The reported reason for the negative vote was that in clinical trials, Brisdelle proved only minimally effective. ...

BACKGROUND As I suppose everyone knows by now, psychiatry has been on the receiving end of some very serious criticism in recent years. The criticism has come from many sources, including: survivors of psychiatric “treatment,” non-psychiatric mental health practitioners, journalists, the general public, and even from some psychiatrists themselves. The content of the criticisms has been equally varied, and includes: that the concept of mental illness is fundamentally spurious and devoid of explanatory significance; that psychiatric “treatment” (i.e. drugging people) is ineffective, physically damaging and disempowering; that psychiatry has forged and continues to maintain corrupt and corrupting relationships with the pharmaceutical industry with regards to the peddling of drugs and the hijacking of research for commercial ends; etc… ...

There’s a Mail Online article about high numbers of antidepressant prescriptions in Blaenau Gwent. The article is dated June 29, and was drawn to my attention by Nanu Grewal from Australia. The article is about a town in Wales where reportedly one sixth of the population is taking antidepressants. That’s about 17%. So presumably all these people have brain disease. Or perhaps it’s because the unemployment rate is double the national average. That in itself is depressing, but to make matters even worse, a “diagnosis” of depression can reportedly help a person qualify for additional government benefits – a strong temptation for people living below the poverty line. ...