Mission San Jose y San Miguel de Aguayo [1720] Mission San Jose was the last stop on our long weekend tour of the sights of Austin and San Antonio. San Jose is one of the five Missions built by the Spaniards in the eighteenth century [the most famous being the Alamo]. It’s now a beautiful […]
DSM 5 Censorship Fails Support from professionals and patients saves free speech Psychology Today: DSM-5 in Distress by Allen J. Frances, M.D. January 12, 2012 Last week I described the plight of Suzy Chapman, a well respected UK patient advocate forced to change the domain name of her website by the heavy-handed tactics of the […]
J&J Marketed Rispersal for Children After FDA Warnings, Texas Jury Told Bloomberg By David Voreacos, Margaret Cronin Fisk and Jef Feeley January 14, 2012 The antipsychotic drug Risperdal was marketed for children and adolescents by Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen unit after warnings by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration not to do so, a witness […]
Today’s court day was long and without dramatic moment, but filled with substantive testimony from a single expert witness – NYC Lawyer Arnold Friede. He’s an interesting man – born in a holocaust survivor camp in Germany and immigrating to the US [Pennsylvania] as a 2 year/old. After graduating in Law from George Washington and […]
Our second day at the trial started much like the first – same cast with different suits and ties. The lawyers were joking back and forth. The judge came in and asked one of the media guys to put up a "j-peg" he was sending, then took the lawyers behind the screen for a conference […]
I haven’t spent a lot of time in courtrooms, some depositions, a few testimonies, jury duty [they never pick people like me, my friend says – professional people are too likely to be "know-it-alls"]. But I always have the same reaction I had yesterday. The room is filled with people – mere people just living […]
The Travis County Courtroom in Austin is a granite megalith built in 1931 in the Moderne style. Inside, it has that formerly white walled look of a building beyond its prime with lots of utilitarian adaptation as time has marched on. We got there early and had the courtroom to ourselves for a half hour. […]
J&J Should Pay Texas $579 Million for Risperdal, Jury Told Bloomberg By David Voreacos, Margaret Cronin Fisk and Jef Feeley January 10, 2012 Johnson & Johnson should reimburse at least $579 million to the Texas Medicaid system for fraudulently promoting its antipsychotic drug Risperdal for uses not approved by U.S. regulators, a state lawyer told […]
1 Terri’s approaching 50 now. Her psychiatric history reaches back into adolescence with suicide attempts, hospitalizations, drug abuse, jail-time. There were children taken away by the State along the way. I met her a couple of years ago in the clinic, brought by her husband, a disabled man who doted on her. The first time […]
This one was just published in the American Journal of Psychiatry by the designer of the DSM-5 Field Trials et al [I’ve tried to separate the chaff, but it’s still long]. It’s message is, "don’t expect too much from the DSM-5 Field Trials". They must be getting worried about something: DSM-5: How Reliable Is Reliable […]