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Archive for January, 2014

risky business…

Antidepressants and Suicide Attempts in Children by William O. Cooper, S. Todd Callahan, Ayumi Shintani, D. Catherine Fuchs, Richard C. Shelton, Judith A. Dudley, Amy J. Graves, and Wayne A. Ray. Pediatrics 2014 133:1–7. OBJECTIVES: Recent data showing possible increased risk for suicidal behavior among children and adolescents treated with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) […]

not a problem…

The trajectory of the DSM-5 revision was set in the book, A Research Agenda for the DSM-5, published in 2002 – a time of high hopes for a biomedical basis for psychiatric disorders. The plan was to include biomarkers in the manual and to add dimensional parameters that cut across disorders, getting around the imprecision […]

open letter to the APA…

Open Letter to the Board of Trustees and the Assembly of the American Psychiatric Association January 21, 2014 It has been a dark time for psychiatry. Since the investigations of Senator Grassley exposed significant corruption and unseated three chairs of Psychiatry in 2008, there has been a series of disturbing exposures involving widespread ghost writing, […]

why? again…

in this post, the footnotes [x] are keyed to the now numbered items in the earlier post when?… to cut down on the ground clutter… The revelation of a closely held secret like Dr. Kupfer et al’s undeclared Conflict of Interest is like an embarrassing slip of the tongue – its meaning is immediately apparent. […]

what!…

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me! One subplot of the story detailed in when?… is the NIMH funding issue. In essence, the NIMH paid Dr. Gibbons around $5 M between 2002 and 2010 to develop his Computerized Adaptive Tests, some of which went for subcontracting with Dr. Kupfer’s Department […]

when?…

Back in November 2012 when I read the first of these Computerized Adaptive Test papers, I noted that it ended with: Funding/Support: This work was supported by grant R01-MH66302 from the National Institute of Mental Health… Additional Information: The CAT-DI will ultimately be made available for routine administration, and its development as a commercial product […]

why?…

What follows is a letter to the APA Assembly members that appeared on the APA website on Tuesday. I’ve posted it below for your perusal. It’s so far off the mark that it’s hard for me to respond to so I’ll defer that for the moment and stick to what it doesn’t do. For the […]

the end of an era…

I was looking on the Psychiatric Times web site for an article, and the ads caught my eye. There were some for vitamin supplements, a few for ipad clones, and then the regular pharma ads – only they weren’t so regular. I guess it’s a testimonial to the dry pipeline. Pristiq® was there, a still […]

relevant…

These two articles are off the beaten path for this blog, but not off of my beaten path: Protecting generalism: moving on from evidence-based medicine? by Joanne Reeve British Journal of General Practice. 2010 60[576: 521–523. [full text on-line] Quality of decision making in modern health care is defined with reference to evidence-based medicine. There […]

make nice talk…

One thing for sure. The less you know about something, the easier it is to have an opinion. And the more you know, the harder it is to evaluate a solution. And the hardest place to be is in the middle – which is where I feel like I am with the business of Data […]