There’s a must-read article on Leonie’s Blog: The grieving mother is at it again! Leonie lost a son to suicide four years ago. The suicide occurred 17 days after he started citalopram, an SSRI, marketed as Celexa. Leonie heard a ‘science expert’ on the radio this week attributing depression to low serotonin levels in the brain. Leonie asks: "How can these idiots keep spouting the ‘chemical imbalance’ rubbish? It is drug company propaganda at its best and has no scientific basis, no factually based evidence whatsoever to conclude that depression is anything other than a reaction to life itself." ...

Joanna Moncrieff, MD, has an article up on Mad in America. It’s called Antipsychotics and Brain Shrinkage: An Update, and is dated June 19. Joanna Moncrieff is the author of The Myth of the Chemical Cure, a widely-read book which challenges the entire concept of mental illness. In the book Dr. Moncrieff also makes the point that the brain shrinkage associated with a “diagnosis” of “schizophrenia” is in fact caused by the neuroleptic drugs, and is not, as psychiatrists claim, a consequence of the so-called illness. ...

There’s a recent post, The role of the psychologist in social change, on Peter Kinderman’s blog that is well worth reading. Peter begins with Martin Luther King’s 1967 statement: “…there are some things in our society, some things in our world, to which we … must always be maladjusted if we are to be people of good will." It is a fact that many, probably most, of the problems that bring people into the mental health system are rooted in poverty, victimization, discrimination and other negative life circumstances. Peter reminds us that: ...

DSM-5 was published on May 18, 2013, amidst great criticism. The fundamental criticism was, and is, that the problems listed in the manual are not illnesses in any ordinary sense of the term. Other critics focused on the pathologizing of normality, the expansion of the diagnostic net by the lowering of thresholds, and the lack of reliability of the so-called diagnoses. The response from the psychiatric community has been mixed. Some, probably most, psychiatrists are keeping their heads down, getting on with the business of selling pills, and hoping that the gravy train won't derail. Others are busy at damage control ...

There’s an interesting post from Duncan Double, MD titled Why does the APA need new editions of DSM? Dr. Double is a psychiatrist and a member of the Critical Psychiatry Network. In his current article, Dr. Double expresses the hope that there won’t be a DSM-6, essentially on the grounds that none of the revisions up to this time has resulted in any increase in validity. So each revision, in effect, replaces an invalid old manual with an invalid new one. ...

BACKGROUND On 3-4 June, the Institute of Psychiatry in London hosted an international conference to mark the publication of DSM-5. On June 10, Sir Simon Wessely, a department head at the Institute, published a paper called DSM-5 at the IoP. The paper is a summary of the conference proceedings, and also, in many respects, a defense of DSM-5. The article touches on many issues that are central to the current anti-psychiatry debate, and for this reason, I thought it might be helpful to take a close look at the piece. ...

Earlier this year, The American Society of Consultant Pharmacists published a report on the use of neuroleptic drugs in nursing homes. According to this report, 25% of nursing home residents receive neuroleptic drugs. In general, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) consider these prescriptions appropriate only if the recipient is psychotic. (Obviously we could discuss this at length, but let’s set that issue aside for now.) What CMS considers entirely inappropriate, however, is prescribing these products to residents with dementia as a way of controlling “difficult” behaviors such as wandering, being abusive, or resisting care. ...

There’s an article titled Restraint – 10 ways it harms psychiatric patients on Sectioned’s blog today. It describes Sectioned’s own experience in this area. Sectioned lists ten ways he/she was harmed by this practice, and the article is well worth reading.

Courtesy of Nanu Grewal in Australia, I’ve come across this interesting paper: Systematic meta-analysis of individual selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor medications and congenital malformations, by Nicholas Myles et al. The authors note that there is some suggestion of a link between SSRI’s, as a group, and birth defects, but that the teratogenicity of individual members of this drug class have not been systematically compared by meta-analysis. Meta-analysis is essentially a systematic review of previous studies and combining of the results of those that meet certain pre-determined criteria for research quality. ...

Melissa, a commenter on a recent post, asked if I would do a post on akathisia. Akathisia literally means inability to sit. People with this problem typically pace for long periods, and if they do sit down, they continue to keep moving and shifting their position in the chair. In severity it can range from a generalized sense of uneasiness or agitation, to severe discomfort and even pain. The discomfort tends to be located in the legs, but can also occur in the hip and pelvic area. In severe cases, the victims pace to the point of exhaustion, but even then sitting does not relieve the discomfort. ...