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Archive for June, 2013

rest my case…

Oh sleep! it is a gentle thing, Beloved from pole to pole! To Mary Queen the praise be given! She sent the gentle sleep from Heaven, That slid into my soul. The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner by by Samuel Taylor Coleridge Sleep disturbance is a much complained of symptom among the depressed, from the […]

seroquel: good to the last drop…

The life of a Key Opinion Leader can be hectic at times, and Dr. Madhukar Trivedi has certainly been busy of late. At the end of March, he was hawking Viibryd® for Forest Laboratories in a syndicated newspaper article in small papers all over the country [Viibryd® – coming to a hamlet near you…]. In […]

impossible situations…

The Trolley Problem With Science Discover Magazine By Neuroskeptic June 20, 2013 Imagine a scientist who does an experiment, and doesn’t like the results. Perhaps the scientist had hoped to see a certain pattern of findings and is disappointed that it’s not there. Suppose that this scientist therefore decided to manipulate the data. She goes […]

most interesting…

‘Ex-gay’ group says it’s shutting down; leader apologizes for ‘pain and hurt’NBC News By Erin McClam and Miranda Leitsinger06/20/2013 A Christian ministry that led the so-called ex-gay movement, which professes to rid people of their homosexuality, has announced that it will shut down, and its leader apologized extensively to gays for causing “pain and hurt.” […]

on formatting

I was an early hacker on the Internet, before the days of Cascading Stylesheets, and I never learned much about them. As time went on, I did some web sites [by hand] and used Cascading Stylesheets, but that was from scratch. When blogging software came along, my daughter and a friend set up the WordPress […]

business as usual…

Dr. Nemeroff’s presentation in London felt like a postcard from the past – a postcard from the time of Paxil Study 329 and TMAP, the time of ghostwriters and chemical imbalance, the period when academic psychiatry and commercial enterprise wore each other like costumes at Mardi Gras bathed in the warm glow of future discovery […]

has to stop…

Dr. Charlie Nemeroff gave his lecture yesterday at the Institute of Psychiatry [IoP], Kings College, London at the inauguration of their new Affective Disorders Centre amid protests from both sides of the Atlantic [including mine coffee-house science…, two footnotes…, mystified in america…, still mystified in america…, character is pervasive…]. His topic was The Neurobiology of […]

viva complexity…

Too many psychiatric diagnoses for children: an epidemic of labels Child in Mind by Claudia Gold June 12, 2013 Allen Frances, professor of child psychiatry at Duke University and chair of the DSM IV [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] task force hit the nail on the head in a recent commentary "Why So […]

as it should be…

Last summer, the raw data for Paxil Study 329 appeared on the GSK web site. I had a go at analyzing it armed with Excel and 30+ year old memories of rudimentary statistics, but I got far enough to feel confident that what we’ve thought all along was, in fact, true. This study did not […]

wordplay…

I don’t really know where it started, this thing I’ve occasionally gotten into about certain words. I sometimes get hung up on why a word means what it means. When I think I’ve got the answer, invariably, I can’t confirm my great discovery in an online dictionary. It always has some old non-english version with […]