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Archive for December, 2011

where are the psychiatrists?…

Therapists revolt against psychiatry’s bible Mental health professionals say new diagnoses will lead to overmedication Salon By Rob Waters Dec 27, 2011 … the DSM-5, is slated for publication in May 2013. As the task force producing it has posted drafts on its website, an undercurrent of dissatisfaction has exploded into a full-scale revolt by […]

something of interest…

Trajectories of depression severity in clinical trials of duloxetine: insights into antidepressant and placebo responses. by Gueorguieva R, Mallinckrodt C, and Krystal JH. Archives of General Psychiatry. 2011  68(12):1227-37. CONTEXT: The high percentage of failed clinical trials in depression may be due to high placebo response rates and the failure of standard statistical approaches to […]

at large world masses…

Targacept: What’s Left After Latest TC-5214 Disappointment? Seeking Alpha by Bryce Istvan December 20, 2011 Today AstraZeneca and Targacept announced the results from their second of four Phase 3 trials for TC-5214, a depression drug. The results failed to meet the primary endpoint based on change in the Montgomery-Asberg Depression Rating Scale total score after […]

one of those people…

Psychiatry: Where are we going? NIMH: Director’s Blog by Thomas Insel June 03, 2011 At the recent annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association [APA], a talk by Dr. Laura Roberts caught my attention. In her presentation on “living up to our commitments,” Dr. Roberts, the new chair of Psychiatry at Stanford, described a dire […]

happy holidays…

but a whimper…

So last time, Tom Insel ended his blog with: Treatment Development: The Past 50 Years NIMH: Director’s Blog by Thomas Insel December 14, 2011 … Given the industry’s lack of innovation over the past three decades and the history of aggressive marketing of psychiatric medications, some might understandably say, “good riddance.” But by almost any […]

a better choice…

In the fall of 2010, I was on a vacation trip driving through New York State – an unexplored and previously unknown world for this southern boy who’d trained in New York City, but was unprepared for the beauty of the rest of the State. It was on that trip that I first read Carl […]

real patients…

Antidepressant Clinical Trials and Subject Recruitment: Just Who Are Symptomatic Volunteers? by Benjamin Brody, M.D., Andrew C. Leon, Ph.D., and James H. Kocsis, M.D. American Journal of Psychiatry 2011 168:1245-1247. [full text on-line] … Why are placebo response rates so high? Some portion of the increase may be attributable to the broadening of inclusion criteria […]

seems like up to me…

I’ve been mildly obsessed with that graph I redrew from the Undurraga’s and Baldessarini’s article [Randomized, Placebo-Controlled Trials of Antidepressants for Acute Major Depression: Thirty-Year Meta-Analytic Review] [what was that all about?…, meta meta meta meta meta meta…]. I’ve claimed that I understood why it stuck in my mind like glue – but I must’ve […]

thoughts for a winter solstice…

In a former time when the terms endogenous depression and exogenous depression were regularly in our vocabulary, there was a way of thinking about the clinical depressions that was substantively different from what we now hear routinely. Those with endogenous depression were thought to have an illness, generated in some way from within. Their depressions […]