Antipsychotics

According to an ex-chief of the FDA, Johnson & Johnson knew long before it started warning people that Risperdal could cause boys to grow breasts.

Three independent studies in two journals reported strong links between antipsychotics and falls and fractures.

Food and Drug Administration-approved information and public advertisements are misleading the public about the actual neurodegenerative risks from second-generation antipsychotics.

The Division of Clinical Psychology of the British Psychological Society published a paper titled Understanding Psychosis and Schizophrenia. The central theme of the paper is that the condition known as psychosis is better understood as a response to adverse life events rather than as a symptom of neurological pathology. The paper was wide-ranging and insightful and, predictably, drew support from most of us on this side of the issue and criticism from psychiatry.  Section 12 of the paper is headed "Medication" and under the subheading "Key Points" you'll find this quote: "[Antipsychotic] drugs appear to have a general rather than a specific effect: there is little evidence that they are correcting an underlying biochemical abnormality."

Teaching psychiatrists the appropriate prescribing guidelines for patients with schizophrenia did not reduce the incidence of inappropriate prescribing.

First generation antipsychotics seem to cause general brain volume loss, while second generation antipsychotics seem to both increase and decrease the thickness of different parts of the brain.

Too many studies of atypical antipsychotic medications are still not meeting even the minimum scientific standards of the internationally agreed-upon CONSORT guidelines for drug trials.

Elderly people in Sweden are five times more likely to be taking antipsychotics if they have a diagnosis of dementia, according to research published in Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica. And among those people with dementia, the lower their education the higher the likelihood they’re taking antipsychotics.

More than half of the prescriptions for antipsychotic drugs in the UK are being issued "off-label" to treat conditions other than those for which the drugs are approved, according to a large study published in the British Medical Journal Open. Researchers also found significantly higher levels of prescribing of the medications to poorer people.

ProPublica is well known for creating interesting data bases that allow anyone hooked up to a computer to see by name whether a physician is accepting Big Pharma payments — from dinners to speaking engagements to consulting services. What may be lesser known is that occasionally ProPublica will publish other data that when carefully mined can reveal even more about the use of psychiatric drugs especially when there is a public funding source available.

The US Food and Drug Administration is warning the public that the antipsychotic medication ziprasidone "is associated with a rare but serious skin reaction...

The Chicago Tribune revisits the issues raised in the 2007 study led by Martin Harrow which found that many people diagnosed with schizophrenia fare...

This week we launch Mad In America Continuing Education. It is an enormous privilege to be a part of this project and to proudly announce that the first course offering is a series of lectures by me on neuroleptic drugs. I review the history of the development of these drugs as well as their short and long term effects. I discuss what conclusions I have drawn from the data; I recommend that we need to work harder to keep people off these drugs or – if we use them – to minimize the dose and stop them as soon as possible. But there remain other pressing concerns for those individuals who are currently taking these drugs.

Robert Heinssen and Thomas Insel of the National Institute of Mental Health argue in Schizophrenia Bulletin that the balance of evidence does not support...

In the Daily Beast, Jay Michaelson struggles to make sense of the fact that the antipsychotic Abilify is America's top-selling drug, even while its...

Robin Williams had "therapeutic" levels of the tetra-cyclic antidepressant mirtazapine in his blood at the time of his suicide, according to the coroner's report...

NPR Shots discusses the plethora of new programs for early intervention for psychosis, with a focus on Ventura Early Intervention Prevention Services, operated by...

Since the 1960s, the positive response rates to antipsychotic medications have been dropping steadily, according to a meta-analysis published in JAMA Psychiatry by Columbia...

It is very common for psychiatric patients, especially those diagnosed with schizophrenia, to be prescribed two or more psychiatric medications at once, and this...

Common second-generation antipsychotic medications are causing symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder to emerge in many people who previously only had schizophrenia symptoms, according to a...

The popular smoking cessation drug Chantix is the medication that most frequently makes people feel suicidal or homicidal, according to figures gathered by the...

Over one-third of young people who were treated for bipolar disorder developed schizophrenia within eight years, according to a study in Schizophrenia Research. In...

Doctors in the 1950s and 1960s made psychiatric diagnoses on orphaned children that led to treatment with antipsychotic drugs, and one of the drivers of this seemed to be that the Church got more money from the State as a result. The doctors, of course, also got paid. This feels like a seriously corrupt nexus operating with near impunity on the basis that no one is going to be bothered to investigate the fate of some orphans.

The provincial government health service of Alberta, Canada recently concluded a successful pilot project that reduced the use of antipsychotic medications for patients with...

This sounds like a weird question – everyone knows that psychosis is often very disabling, and antipsychotic drugs are widely recognized for their effects in reducing psychosis in at least most people, and most often taking effect in just a few days. And when people become psychotic again, it’s often understood that it’s because they “weren’t taking their meds.” But what if it’s trickier than that? What if “antipsychotic” drugs make things better in the short term, but make long term problems worse? How would we even know?