Industry

A New Zealand judge has upheld the appeal of a sexual abuse survivor against a decision that sexual abuse cannot cause schizophrenia.  The judge...

Paul Woodward of Beyond Meds critiques the Washington Post's report on the reduction of gun control, and increase in mental health-care budgets, following Sandy...

Attorneys representing about 300 lawsuits alleging that Risperdal causes enlargement of breast tissue in men have asked a Pennsylvania judge to unseal relevant clinical...

Responding to a letter signed by 175 scholars asking for an inquiry into the death of Dan Markingson at the University of Minnesota, the Faculty Senate voted to investigate clinical research at the university. But the university president says the Markingson case will not be part of the investigation. What is he trying to hide?

These 10 areas are not the only ways that mental health professionals can increase misery in suffering people, as there are other physical, psychological, spiritual, and societal adverse effects caused by psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health professionals. The article was written in response to AlterNet's recently republished Psychotherapy Networker article, "The 14 Habits of Highly Miserable People," authored by psychotherapist Cloe Madanes, which enraged many readers. The reality is that we human beings can sometimes become so trapped by overwhelmingly oppressive forces (financial, interpersonal, and otherwise) that lecturing us into behaving more joyfully only creates more pain. This leads to the first of "10 Ways Mental Health Professionals Increase Misery in Suffering People."

Before the early 1990’s the use of antipsychotic medications was largely reserved for adults with severe psychotic disorders; unpleasant involuntary movement disorders (extrapyramidal side-effects) and cardiovascular risks appear to have largely limited their use outside these disorders. The introduction and intense marketing of what seemed to be better tolerated and safer (now proven not to be), second generation atypical antipsychotics (AAPs) such as risperidone, olanzapine, quetiapine, ziprasidone and aripiprazole from the mid 1990’s led to a rapid expansion of antipsychotic medication use for a wide variety of unlicensed conditions and in more diverse clinical populations.

The New York Times quotes Keith Connors, an early advocate to legitimize Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, as saying that current rates of diagnosis and...

Rep. Tim Murphy, a former psychologist, introduced the "Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act" to congress today, a bill aimed at stopping violence...

Consumer Reports writes that the number of children prescribed antipsychotics has tripled over the last 10 to 15 years, despite a lack of evidence...

On Monday the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Pfizer's appeal of a $142 million award to the Kaiser Foundation for illegal marketing of Neurontin.  The...

The Washington Post yesterday published an article by MIA blogger Sandra Steingard, titled "A Psychiatrist Thinks Some Patients are Better off Without Antipsychotic Drugs." In...

A featured article in the British Medical Journal relates the perspective of FDA investigator Thomas Marciniak, who says “Drug companies have turned into marketing machines. They’ve kind of...

Counsel for ex rel Watson v. King-Vassel - Psychrights' latest effort to show that prescribing medication for children that is not supported by scientific evidence constitutes fraud...

A Pennsylvania Superior Court has affirmed a lower court's ruling that GlaxoSmithKline is not responsible for the congenital heart defect that lead Joanne Thomas...

LAW360 reports that a Pennsylvania federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit over a movement disorder attributed to Bristol-Myers' drug Abilify.  The judge held that...

A century ago Freud and Jung made us aware of the biases underpinning what patients say. Not everything should be accepted at face value. In particular claims of abuse may not be based on reality. We needed experts – analysts – they claimed, to tease out what is real from what is not. The Catholic Church was once intensely hostile to Freud, but when it came to child abuse adopting a Freudian approach was very convenient. But while Freud essentially denied that real abuse was taking place and got away with it in his life-time, the Catholic Church has learnt to its cost that many claims of abuse are real.

Law 360 reports that Johnson & Johnson asked a Pennsylvania judge to keep a series of clinical studies related to the drug Risperdal under...

The widow of  Darwin Stout - who murdered their son and took his own life while taking the nicotine-cessation drug Chantix - has filed...

• Incoming president of WPA questions medical model
• Focus should be on functioning, not symptoms
• Says psychiatry has much to apologize for

The mental health care of young people has increased more rapidly than that of adults, and has coincided with increased psychotropic medication use, according...

In Belgium, patients with mental health problems mostly receive drug treatment despite the emphasis in international guidelines on the importance of psychological approaches. Currently one in ten Belgians takes antidepressants. That makes Belgium the European leader when it comes to antidepressant prescriptions and costs our country 300 million euros annually. This has been a glaring concern for our Minister of Health. From January 1, 2016, all psychologists and psychotherapists in Belgium will need to register in an official list. This should slash the number of unqualified therapists and help more Belgians stay off antidepressants.

The authors of a paper that endorses a computerized test for depression have acknowledged failure to disclose joint ownership of a company formed to bring the test to...

Justina Pelletier, a 15-year-old Connecticut teenager who had been diagnosed with mitochondrial disease, remains trapped in Boston Children's Hospital 9 months after a team...

Following Johnson & Johnson's record $2.2 billion settlement for criminal marketing — including $1.4 billion related to its marketing of Risperdal, making it one of the...

Facing a sexual abuse lawsuit, the archdiocese of St Paul and Minneapolis made a big deal of putting an independent panel in place to investigate. They put the Reverend Reginald Whitt in charge of appointing the panel and receiving its reports on behalf of the archdiocese. Rev. Whitt told priests and deacons that the task force may review specific files to determine whether the policies of the archdiocese concerning clergy sexual misconduct were properly followed. But, he wrote, “Access to these files will be within my control, and limited only to what is necessary for the task force.” This sounds terribly like the approach Sir Andrew Witty is attempting to put in place for GSK, AbbVie and the rest of the branded pharmaceutical industry vis-a-vis abuses, including child abuse committed in their name. They are asserting their right to spin their version of what it is you put in your body even though this clashes fundamentally with your right to know what you are putting in your body.