In a potentially seismic move, the National Institute of Mental Health – the world’s biggest mental health research funder, has announced only two weeks before the launch of the DSM-5 diagnostic manual that it will be “re-orienting its research away from DSM categories”. In the announcement, NIMH Director Thomas Insel says the DSM lacks validity […]
A commenter recently asked "who is your audience?" He was apparently bumfuzzled by my choice of topics [Emil Kraepelin’s politics: all ears…, an open question…]. It’s a good question, but I don’t know the answer [and I’m still cogitating about Kraepelin]. I’m old now, so I guess I write about what I’m thinking about. But […]
Planning out your May reading? For those of you thinking about spending the $133.22 on a paperback DSM-5, let me suggest some alternatives instead: All five total $98.68. Hours of enjoyable reading for under $100.00!. Flash! Update! Here’s another going for $17.48 on Amazon bringing the total to $116.16…
European Medicines Agency receives interim decisions of the General Court of the EU on access to clinical and non-clinical information Press release 30/04/2013 The European Medicines Agency [EMA] has been ordered by the General Court of the European Union not to provide documents as part of two access-to-documents requests until a final ruling is […]
I agonized over that last post. I have no interest in discounting Emil Kraepelin or his legacy. I read that paper by Michael Shepherd in mid-morning and it didn’t get finished until after midnight – and it was on my mind the whole time. It felt like an unwanted hot potato – once in hand, […]
The debates about psychology versus biology as either the cause or the treatment of mental illness are probably as old as the topic itself: Actually, that’s not bad, the blind giant and the dwarf psychologist are often heard modern criticisms – the heavy-handed psychopharmacologist and the impotent psychotherapist [although the italicized adjectives are sometimes reversed]. […]
The STAR*D study came to us from the dawn of a new century – an outgrowth of a notion that one could improve the effectiveness of the antidepressants by creating an algorithm for trying different drugs when there was a treatment failure [Sequenced Treatment Alternatives to Relieve Depression]. It had already been implemented in Texas […]
"My optimism is based partly on the extraordinary vitality of neuroscience and perhaps, even more important, on the emergence of remarkable new tools and technologies to identify the genetic risk factors for psychiatric disorders, to investigate the circuitry of the human brain, and to replace current animal models that have failed to predict efficacious new […]
So what pollen does to the brain is make things fuzzy and they get lost in the sulcus-scape. This is a thread I lost three weeks ago that I wanted to follow up on – an article by Dr. Steven Hyman, former Director of the NIMH [see Psychiatric Drug Development: Diagnosing a Crisis, whither the […]