Gone for the weekend. Here’s Dr. Allen Frances’ lecture to fill the spaces better than I could…
DSM-5 Costs $25 Million, Putting APA in a Financial Hole Huffington Post by Allen Frances 05/30/2012 The American Psychiatric Association just reported a surprisingly large yearly deficit of $350,000. This was caused by reduced publishing profits, poor attendance at its annual meeting, rapidly declining membership, and wasteful spending on DSM-5. APA reserves are now below […]
I wrote some rambling series [the future of an illusion…, the dreams of our fathers…] trying to get my mind around those times in the early 1970s when the DSM-III was percolating, and how it came to take the roads it followed. I didn’t have much trouble understanding the animosity about psychoanalysis. Even though I […]
I’ve been paralyzed writing about the NIMH grant awarded to Charlie Nemeroff last week. I reported that it occurred [speechless…], and what it was for, then I kept putting off thinking about it – even though the initial report from Pharmalot remained open on my computer’s task bar. It wasn’t just the absurdity that he […]
Picking up after the last post, after constructing the Research Diagnostic Criteria, they did an inter-rater reliability study on their subtypes [center column] of Major Depressive Disorder and found fairly respectable Kappa values: Now comes the confusing part. They then tried to look at overlap. As best I can tell, they had criteria for […]
Back in December, I had a shot at describing Melancholia [melancholia…]. But there are certainly better versions. Dr. Bernard Carroll’s clinical description in verse is unlikely to ever be surpassed [Bringing back melancholia – full text on-line]. And there are vivid internal descriptions by sufferers [Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness by William Styron and […]
I’ve been moderately obsessed with a single topic of late. It’s something that happened to psychiatry back around 1980-ish with the coming of the DSM-III. My obsession is personal, because it happened to me. We all know that both Managed Care and the Pharmaceutical Industry were major forces in how things have played out, but […]
Spitzer Recants: Why Can’t APA Admit Mistakes and Correct Them Huffington Post by Allen Frances 05/26/2012 Ben Carey’s front page story in the New York Times movingly recounts Bob Spitzer’s apology for an ill-advised study he conducted more than a decade ago. The background is dramatic. Spitzer had been a hero to the gay and […]
inertia [ɪnˈɜËʃə,-ʃɪə] — noun 1. the state of being inert; disinclination to move or act 2. the tendency of a body to preserve its state of rest or uniform motion unless acted upon by an external force Inertia isn’t just a property of physical bodies. It’s applicable as a concept in a wide range […]