Ever since I ran across this graph of the rates of institutionalization, I’ve been mulling over the plight of the severely mentally ill during my time in psychiatry [that faint line above the abscissa marks when I was directly involved]. Writing about it a week or so ago [functional improvement…], I called it Transinstitutionalization – […]
My last post [and wasted research dollars…] lead me to Dr. Nemeroff’s 1984 paper announcing that Cortictrophin-Releasing Factor [CRF] is significantly elevated in the CSF [cerebrospinal fluid] of patients with Major Depressive Disorder – a thirty year old observation that has figured heavily in his research since then – culminating in the clinical trial listed […]
It’s unlikely that anyone reading this blog or following the peculiar trajectory of academic and organized psychiatry doesn’t know a lot about Charlie Nemeroff and his fall from "Boss 0f Bosses" as Chairman at Emory. He’s become a paradigm for so many things – ghost writing, conflicts of interest, speaker’s bureaus, advisory boards, wheelings-and-dealings, etc. […]
This graph is from a legal article about something else, but the data seems solid. There’s a faint line above the abscissa which marks the period when I was in training and then full time on an academic faculty, daily involved with the treatment of psychotic patients. It was towards the end of the massive […]
This is not really a blog post – more like a library of selected readings. Over the last year, there has been a dialog about the use of maintenance antipsychotic medication in the long term treatment of schizophrenic patients scattered around in various publications that hinges on an article published in JAMA Psychiatry last summer. […]
I never thought of myself as a "learned intermediary" – someone who is a go-between between patients and the pharmaceutical industry. I think of myself as someone who needs to know a lot about the drugs I prescribe – gathered from the literature, colleagues, and patients. In fact, I resent being seen that way by […]
I was in a Clinical Trial frame of mind after my last post, and I happened to run across a CD that I had gotten with a FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] request a few years ago when I was looking at Paxil Study 329. It’s the data from the original Paxil NDA [New Drug […]
But our discussions of mental illness rarely focus on this inconvenient truth: these illnesses are currently just as fatal as the “big killers.” We must continue to invest in research to develop new and more effective treatments for people with depression and other mental illnesses. The goal must be a future in which no lives […]
UK Recommends Covering Sovaldi Hepatitis Pill Pharmalot: WSJ By Ed Silverman Aug 14, 2014 The U.K. agency that evaluates the cost effectiveness of prescription drugs has recommended the government pay for the controversial Sovaldi hepatitis C treatment, although not for all patients. The move, which still requires a final endorsement, comes as the medicine causes […]
I started writing about these topics a few years ago because I was stunned by the deceptive presentation methods in clinical trial reporting. And then I discovered that if a trial didn’t come out like they wanted and couldn’t be doctored, they just didn’t publish it. The more I looked, the worse things got. I […]