The current Psychiatric Times has an odd article on a familiar topic, Robert Gibbons latest assault on the FDA Black Box Warning about suicidality in children and adolescents on antidepressants [an anatomy of deceit…]. These Gibbons papers [Suicidal Thoughts and Behavior With Antidepressant Treatment, Benefits From Antidepressants] have been reviewed here ad nauseum. They purport […]
The problem of waning new drug development and the empty pipeline is bigger than just psychopharmacology. A primal groan is heard medicine wide and the N.I.H. Translational Science initiative to speed drug development applies to pharmaceuticals of all kinds. Frankly, it all feels like a trick, and according to this article just out in the […]
ser·en·dip·i·ty [ser-uhn–dip-i-tee] — noun the faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident Psychiatry, The Pharmaceutical Industry, and The Road to Better Therapeutics by H. Christian Fibiger Schizophrenia Bulletin. 2012 38(4):649–650. … The discovery of all three major classes of psychiatric drugs, antidepressants, antipsychotics, and anxiolytics, came about on the basis of serendipitous clinical observation. At […]
The Illusions of Psychiatry The New York Review of Books by Marcia Angell July 14, 2011 In the late 1970s, the psychiatric profession struck back—hard. As Robert Whitaker tells it in Anatomy of an Epidemic, the medical director of the American Psychiatric Association [APA], Melvin Sabshin, declared in 1977 that “a vigorous effort to remedicalize […]
In a psychotherapy, one hears people say some mighty peculiar things, things that make no sense at all. It’s fairly easy to see how the belief underlying those odd things might be causing the difficulty that brought them to treatment in the first place. But just identifying a maladaptive belief and its connection to their […]
As a child growing up in the pre-TV, pre-Internet 1940s, information gathering was harder work than it is now. There was a Compton’s Encyclopedia and a Webster’s Dictionary on the shelf in the Dining Room; the Bookmobile came once a week; and every Sunday, there were "the funnies" – the comics section of the Newspaper. […]
This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper. The Hollow Men | T.S.Eliot | 1925 DSM-5 R.I.P? Neuroskeptic August 3, 2012 Yesterday, the proposed new DSM-5 revision of the American Psychiatric Associations "Bible of Psychiatry" […]
In June 2011, Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, reviewed three books in the New York Review of Books: The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth by Irving Kirsch Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America by Robert […]
I find myself perseverating on the concept of the pipeline – pipe·line noun 1. a long tubular conduit or series of pipes, often underground, with pumps and valves for flow control, used to transport crude oil, natural gas, water, etc., especially over great distances. 2. a route, channel, or process along which something passes or […]