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 […]
A funny thing happened on the way to growing up. While I was in medical school, we got a new chairman of Internal Medicine at the University of Tennessee. He was a big guy, both in persona and in medical reputation – not the kind of person you’d expect at a State Medical School in […]
Since my earliest days writing about Pharma and the state of modern psychiatry, I’ve used some version of the image on the left below to convey my beef about the state of play – most recently a few days ago talking about Dr. David Healy’s Not So Bad Pharma post [see least-squares-mean patients…]. It’s meant […]
It is difficult to argue against evidence based medicine. Why would anyone even want to do that? Likewise, the double-blinded randomized clinical trial makes intuitive sense to scientists or anyone else that gives it any thought. The way to see if a drug works is to take a homogeneous group with the same affliction and […]
A disease called ‘childhood’ New York Post By DR. ALLEN FRANCES March 31, 2013 Last week, The Post reported that more than 145,000 city children struggle with mental illness or other emotional problems. That estimate, courtesy of New York’s Health Department, equals an amazing 1 in 5 kids. Could that possibly be true? There is […]
Diagnosis and its Discontents: The DSM Debate Continues Psychiatric Times By Ronald W. Pies, MD March 29, 2013 “As to diseases, make a habit of two things—to help, or at least to do no harm.” –Hippocrates… “An agnostic is someone who doesn’t know, and di- is a Greek prefix meaning “two.” So “diagnostic” means someone […]