Evidence That Sadness When Bereaved is Not Illness
While the DSM-IV recognizes that depressive symptoms are sometimes normal in bereaved individuals, this "Bereavement Exclusion" is targeted for elimination from the DSM-V. However...
Why Marijuana Can Trigger Psychosis
Brain scans by London researchers show why marijuana calms some people, but can cause psychosis or paranoid thoughts in others. They found that THC...
Antidepressants/Depression
A. The Natural Course of Depression
Prior to the widespread use of antidepressants, the National Institute of Mental Health told the public that people regularly...
Mad In America’s Chapters
Preface
The World Health Organization has repeatedly found that people diagnosed with schizophrenia in the U.S. and other developed countries fare much worse than schizophrenia...
Antipsychotics and Chronic Illness
A. The Chronicity Problem Becomes Apparent (1960s-1979s)
It seems paradoxical that drugs that ameliorate acute psychotic symptoms over the short term will increase the likelihood...
Polypharmacy/Bipolar illness
A. Bipolar Illness Before the Psychopharmacology Era
Prior to 1955, bipolar illness was a rare disorder. There were only 12,750 people hospitalized with that disorder...
Outcomes in the Era of Atypical Antipsychotics
Once second-generation antipsychotic drugs came on the market (which are known as “atypicals”), there were claims by psychiatric researchers that they would lead to...
A Rorschach Test for Psych Drugs
On October 23, the New York Times ran a very nice feature story about a Los Angeles woman, Keris Myrick, who, even though she...
Now Antidepressant-Induced Chronic Depression Has a Name: Tardive Dysphoria
Three recently published papers, along with a report by a Minnesota group on health outcomes in that state, provide new reason to mull over...
”Broken Brains” and “Beautiful Minds”
When I first interviewed Brandon Banks, in the spring of 2008, while researching Anatomy of an Epidemic, he had recently entered Elizabethtown Community College...
Update on the Star*D Report
Two months ago, I wrote a post about a New Yorker article that reported that 67% of the depressed patients in the STAR*D trial...
A Schizophrenia Mystery Solved?
One of the enduring mysteries in schizophrenia research circles has been the disparity in outcomes between schizophrenia patients in "developing countries" and those in...
Hypotheses, Scientific Evidence, and On Being Compared to an AIDS Denier
In today’s Boston Globe (April 14), Dr. Dennis Rosen, a pediatric lung and sleep specialist at Children’s Hospital in Boston, reviews my new book,...
Antipsychotics/Schizophrenia
The long-term outcomes literature for antipsychotics, which has been compiled over a period of nearly 50 years, consistently tells of drugs that increase the...
Fact Checking the New Yorker, Part Two
In his March 1 article in the New Yorker, Louis Menand wrote that the NIMH's STAR*D trial showed that antidepressants produced a 67% recovery...
Fact Checking the New Yorker
In the March 1 issue of the New Yorker, Louis Menand surveyed the topsy-turvy world of treatments for depression, writing in part of the...
