I started medical school naively thinking of medicine and science as a somewhat linear march towards the truth, and woke up this morning thinking about fads in medicine, how they come and go much as in popular culture, and how many I’ve seen in the intervening half century. Last week, I was writing about Tom […]
In The Creation of Psychopharmacology, Dr. David Healy describes an interesting historical landmark – 1968. If you were alive in 1968, you remember that year like it was yesterday – the TET Offensive in Viet Nam, the Civil Rights Act, the MLK and RFK assasinations, the riots at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, the tanks […]
[the flyer] At the top of the flyer, it says "Coming in 2013," and down at the bottom next to the APPI logo, it says, "The First and Last Word in Psychiatry." On a lark, I went looking for when the American Psychiatric Publishing was founded. It was 1981, the year after the DSM-III came […]
Leading psychiatrists question psychiatry’s diagnostic manual Fox News By Dr. Keith Ablow November 12, 2012 With the new American Psychiatric Association Diagnostic and Statistical Manual V [DSM V] slated for publication next year, leaders in American psychiatry are criticizing the volume as unreliable. The DSM is the compendium of conditions psychiatrists use to diagnose their […]
Hot Flash! Pfizer Pays $67.5M To Settle Pristiq Suits Pharmalot By Ed Silverman November 13th, 2012 Here is a hot flash for you. Pfizer agreed to pay $67.5 million to settle a class-action litigation in which shareholders in Wyeth – which Pfizer bought three years ago – alleged that adverse side effect data for the […]
A Decade of Perspective NIMH Director’s Blog By Thomas Insel November 05, 2012 In another week or so, I will have been director of NIMH for ten years. This is longer than any previous director dating back to the inaugural director, Bob Felix, who served from 1949 to1964. In leadership, longevity is not necessarily a […]
While it’s not about a psychiatric drug, the Tamiflu controversy is about a central issue for all of us – data transparency – the move to require pharmaceutical companies to publish the raw patient level data for all clinical trials. If you haven’t followed the story, it’s a hard one to enter in the middle. […]
What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make and end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from… T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding [1942] The decision to reject one paradigm is always simultaneously the decision to accept another, and the judgment leading to that decision involves the […]
Field Trial Results Guide DSM Recommendations Huffington Post by David J. Kupfer, M.D. Written with Helena C. Kraemer, Ph.D. 11/7/2012 Two years ago this month, APA announced the start of field trials that would subject proposed diagnostic criteria for the future DSM-5 to rigorous, empirically sound evaluation across diverse clinical settings. And now, as the […]
Development of a Computerized Adaptive Test for Depression by Robert D. Gibbons, PhD; David J. Weiss, PhD; Paul A. Pilkonis, PhD; Ellen Frank, PhD; Tara Moore, MA, MPH; Jong Bae Kim, PhD; David J. Kupfer, MD Archives of General Psychiatry. 2012 69[11]:1104-1112. Context: Unlike other areas of medicine, psychiatry is almost entirely dependent on patient […]