So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years- Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres- Trying to use words, and every attempt Is a wholy new start, and a different kind of failure Because one has only learnt to get the better of words For the thing one […]
The thing I’ve most enjoyed about later life and retirement is that I can think about whatever I want to think about, recall what I want to re-call. I wasn’t aware of it earlier, but in adulthood proper [the productive years], there was a gravitas, something about sticking to a topic or completing a thought, […]
If there were any heros in the CNS pharmaceutical industry during the quarter century between the approval of Prozac and the present, I don’t know who they were. In discussing his recent book, Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare, Peter Gøtzsche of the Nordic Cochrane Group says, "I call psychiatry […]
The fact that there is no evidence confirming the brain disease attribution is, at this point, irrelevant. What we are dealing with here is fashion, politics and money. This level of intellectual /scientific dishonesty is just too egregious for me to continue to support by my membership. from Loren Mosher’s letter of resignation to the […]
One thing I’ve noticed in life is that the most desirable trait in other people, almost a magnet, is humility – people who are right-sized about what they know and what they are. And yet it might well be the most impossible thing of all to achieve in one’s own life. This morning, we heard […]
It’s been quite a couple of weeks. The newshound I live with has had the Kennedy retrospectives and now the Mandela retrospectives running in the background almost constantly. It’s interesting to see so much footage of events that I was around for, and remember what those times felt like long before history had them organized. […]
My practice as a long term psychotherapist in a cosmopolitan city hardly prepared me for a rural charity clinic in Appalachia. It wasn’t an unfamiliar place, but it was an alien practice environment. More than that, I’d been a Rip Van Winkle to the Age of Psychopharmacology, and it was a shock to meet patients […]
There’s a fascinating interview in the BMJ worth anyone’s time to read: FDA official: “clinical trial system is broken” by Deborah Cohen, investigations editor British Medical Journal. 2013 347:f6980. [full text on-line] First, a word about the FDA as a reminder. The FDA was established to insure the safety of foods and drugs in 1906 […]
Varenicline, smoking cessation, and neuropsychiatric adverse events. by Gibbons RD, and Mann JJ. American Journal of Psychiatry. 2013 170[12]:1460-1467. OBJECTIVE In 2009, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a black box warning for varenicline regarding neuropsychiatric events. The authors used data from randomized controlled trials and from a large Department of Defense [DOD] observational […]