As a practitioner, I saw a number of patients with previous psychotherapies that had failed. The commonest reasons for failure were mis-diagnoses, and of those, a frequent culprit was the failure to recognize the contribution of traumatic experience to a patient’s illness. In retrospect, that wasn’t surprising because the patients generally didn’t know it either. […]
The whole TED Talk is here
I’ve been thinking about the DSM-5 a lot more than I’d like lately, but in the process I’ve at least clarified a few points in my own mind – strewn about below in no particular order: The worst thing is something that didn’t actually make it into the manual, but I’ve talked about it ad […]
Well, what a pleasure to read an article in the mainstream media that features so many familiar voices from the best and brightest [I edited out the APA responses because I’m frankly tired of hearing the expert count and about their pseudo-transparency]: Are we over-diagnosing mental illness? CNN By Katti Gray March 16, 2013 To […]
"My antidepressant isn’t working any more," she said when I met her 6 months ago. And she seemed pretty depressed. She was an attractive thirty something who had a good job, her own home. It didn’t take too long to find out that she’d just ended a live-in relation with a man she initially thought […]
Brain Awareness NIMH Director’s Blog By Thomas Insel March 11, 2013 This is the time of March Madness, Daylight Savings Time, and what Emily Dickinson famously called the “month of expectation.” March is also Brain Awareness Month, an annual celebration with school visits, community lectures, and lab tours to introduce the public to the mind-blowing […]
Treatment Resistant Depression [TRD] is a fictitious entity created by the KOL set to explain why the SSRIs weren’t wonder drugs. One of the most lucrative outcomes from TRD’s invention was the notion that adding atypical antipsychiotics would bring relief to the afflicted through some as yet unspecified mechanism. Spielmans et al poked a hole […]
Years ago I joked, "What they might as well do is make a table with all the DSM diagnoses down the side and all the psychiatric meds across the top and then just fill in the blanks." I was making fun of the endless clinical trials that were choking our journals. One of my more […]
Dan Markingson’s Chart Another subject’s chart Several weeks ago when I read the article about Carl Elliott’s recent findings in the Dan Markingson case, I was at the beach on a notebook computer and unable to upload any graphics. So this is a supplement to living history… and sign up…. As a reminder, in the […]
If you don’t know about the Dan Markingson Case, it’s worth looking into. The icon on the left sidebar takes you to a petition to the Governor of Minnesota requesting an complete investigation. Carl Elliott has pressed for an investigation with little success and has now set up a petition to the Minnesota Governor asking […]