It really does sort of look like a pipeline. It’s the SSRis, SNRIs, and Atypicals graphed by the year of their FDA Approval. The first time I ever heard that term, pipeline, I thought it was a joke of some kind. But I found out it was in wide usage in the business and KOL […]
In surprise decision, FDA blocks crucial cognitive claim for Takeda’s Brintellix FiercePharma By Tracy Staton March 29, 2016 The FDA doesn’t have to follow the advice of its expert review panels, but it usually does. That’s a standard line in stories about advisory committee votes. Unfortunately for Lundbeck and Takeda, their new Brintellix app is […]
A month ago I ran across a MEDPAGE TODAY article about Vortioxetine [Brintellix®] and a hearing at the FDA [see indications… and more vortioxetine story…]. Brintellix® had been approved by the FDA for use in Major Depressive Disorder in September of 2014. I had previously run across it through a review article in the Journal […]
This last weekend, I finally saw the film, The Big Short, the Academy Award winning movie about the 2008 financial collapse. I’d spent more time than I’d like to admit looking into the ins and outs of what happened, and when I heard there was a movie, I wondered how they were going to present […]
When March Madness time comes around, I always remember a time when it wasn’t about Basketball for me – during the decade when I was a Psychiatric Residency Training Director. That may sound like an honorific, but that’s not how it was. I was only a year beyond my own residency and wasn’t exactly recruited, […]
Last summer, in announcing my discovery of a biomarker for suicidality, I failed to mention that it was unclear whether it was the Y chromosome itself or the absence of the second X chromosome that was the culprit. No progress has been made in answering this important question over the course of the last year. […]
In Annie Proulx’s novel, The Shipping News, emotionally broken protagonist Quoyle and his young daughter move to his ancestral home in Newfoundland to reclaim his life. He goes to work for the local paper, The Gammy Bird, where reporter Billy tries to show him the ropes: Billy: It’s finding the center of your story, the […]
"Are you sure it’s not a chemical imbalance?" He came to the clinic the last time I worked saying he’d had a show-stopping anxiety attack last Fall – one of those race-to-the-ER-I’m-dying anxiety attacks. Since then, he’s had several others and has had a background sense of doom. The story was in contrast to his […]
Editor Jeffrey Drazen‘s New England Journal of Medicine is back on the front burner once again. You’ll likely recall the series he introduced by reporter Lisa Rosenbaum that argued that there was an inappropriate preoccupation with conflict of interest in general and they specifically pondered lifting the ban on review articles and editorials by authors […]
In my time in psychiatry, the specialty has often been shaped by its critics. When I arrived in 1974, Thomas Szasz was one of those major critics. While his principle focus was on civil liberties in his opposition to involuntary hospitalization and treatment, his argument was more fundamental – that the whole notion of mental […]