Even when there’s no cure for an illness, it’s helpful for the afflicted to know what’s wrong – why they’re having trouble thinking: Right on schedule…
Back in the fall [c’est la vie…], I happened onto a site for a European group [STOP-DSM] centered in France that opposed the DSM [not just the DSM-5] and its influence on the ICD [International Classification of Diseases]. Here’s what I had to say about it back in November: Rather than trying to synopsize their […]
In my mind, I call openings like this the Sally Laden Memorial Global Burden of Depression Opening Paragraphs after the most famous of our ghost writers: Psychiatric Drug Development: Diagnosing a Crisis The Dana Foundation: Cerebrum By Steven E. Hyman April 02, 2013 [full text available on-line] During the past three years the global pharmaceutical […]
I know it’s not a psychopharmacology drug, but Tamiflu has become the index case for data transparency thanks to the efforts of Peter Doshi, Tom Jefferson, Ben Goldacre, Fiona Godlee, the Cochrane Collaboration and 44,047 current signers of the AllTrials petition. There have been false alarms before, but this report in the BMJ certainly looks […]
…sometimes, all one can do is stand in awe. "Head of Healthcare and Key Opinion Leader Management." It sounds like a riddle, "If a Key Opinion Leader is Managed, can it still be called an Opinion?" Amazing…
Back in the early post-DSM-III days when psychiatry was undergoing such a profound transformation, there was something I didn’t understand. I still don’t. Psychiatry was being liberated from ideology and moving to the one true path of evidence-based medicine, but most of the rhetoric of the time was focused on what we weren’t going to […]
Some things take a moment to digest. This next bit from the story of anti-depressant drug development seems at first like something being made up, but that’s not the case. It’s called the behavioral despair test, the Porsolt, or the forced-swimming test [1977]: Animals are subjected to two trials during which they are forced to […]
Dr. Steven Hyman was Director of the NIMH from 1996-2001 then returned to Harvard as a Provost from 2001-2011. He is currently the "Director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard… He has worked, more recently to open psychiatric classifications, including the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of […]
[Efficacy of paroxetine in the treatment of adolescent major depression:a randomized, controlled trial]
It’s hard to argue with the idea of think·tank projects. We all know about the Manhattan Project, Bell Labs transistor and later UNIX, DARPA’s satelite and the Internet, NASA’s rockets and space travel. More recently, the Human Genome Project and the Connectome Project come to mind. Enters now B·R·A·I·N: Obama Kicks Off $100-Million Project to […]