Posts

On September 30, the Wisconsin State Journal posted an article online. It’s called County Executive Joe Parisi proposes new mental health program for county school district, and was written by Andrea Anderson. [Thanks to S. Randolph Kretchmar on Twitter for the link.] The gist of the article is that Joe Parisi, the County Executive of Dane County, Wisconsin, is proposing to allocate $90,000 each to two school districts “…to treat student mental health…” ...

There’s an interesting article on Harvard Law Petrie-Flom Center’s blog titled Daubert as a Problem for Psychiatrists. It was written by Alex Stein and is dated September 19. [Thanks to Dustin Salzedo for drawing my attention to this in a comment on an earlier post.] The article deals with the legal rules governing the admission of expert testimony. Apparently there are two different sets of rules in this area, known respectively as Frye and Daubert. ...

On September 27, the New York Times published an article called Lacking Rules, Insurers Balk at Paying for Intensive Psychiatric Care. The author is Reed Abelson. Thanks to S. Randolph Kretchmar on Twitter for the link. The article describes the kinds of conflicts that can occur between people with “mental illnesses” wanting “treatment,” and insurance companies who sometimes are reluctant to pay for this “treatment.” The article is fairly balanced. It presents a number of actual cases of people who were experiencing difficulty. But it also tries to do justice to the insurance company’s position: ...

There’s an interesting exposé in the London Daily Mail, September 29, titled Critics claim antidepressants are being handed out like sweets… Thanks to Leonie and Antidepaware on Twitter for the link. To find out how easily people could get prescriptions for antidepressants, the Mail sent "…three women of differing ages — all of whom had no current mental health issues — to their doctors, reporting fictional symptoms of mild depression which had lasted for three to six weeks." ...

On September 25, PsychCentral ran an article on this topic. The article was a commentary on a 2013 meta-analysis conducted by Katharine Barnard, PhD, et al of the University of Southamptom, UK. The meta-analysis examined three systemic reviews and 22 studies. RESULTS "There was evidence that antidepressant use is associated with type 2 diabetes. Causality is not established, but rather, the picture is confused, with some antidepressants linked to worsening glucose control, particularly with higher doses and longer duration, others linked with improved control, and yet more with mixed results. The more recent, larger studies, however, suggest a modest effect." ...

Jeffrey Lieberman, MD, President of the APA, has written a guest post, In the Wake of the Navy Yard Shooting: A Way Forward, on EverydayHealth. Everyday Health Inc. is a media company which operates for-profit websites on health and related matters. It’s been confirmed that the Navy Yard shooter had been taking trazadone, an antidepressant of the serotonin antagonist and reuptake inhibitor (SARI) class, and the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs has indicated that it plans to investigate to what extent the drug might have been a causative factor. ...

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. ...