"For some reason, the [American] people I meet in my country are not the same as the ones I knew in the United States. A mysterious change seems to come over Americans when they go to a foreign land. They isolate themselves socially. They live pretentiously. They’re loud and ostentatious." The Ugly American -1958 Sometimes, […]
Among the things I’ve had trouble understanding is why the DSM-V Task Force thought they could aim for breaking out a biologically based DSM-5 without any substantive evidence to support such a move. Another imponderable is why they set up a closed shop and paid so little attention to the mounting criticism along the way […]
The rationale for eliminating the use of Freud’s theories to explain certain mental illnesses in the DSM-II [or for that matter Adolf Meyer’s ideas in the original DSM] was that the theories were speculative – ideology rather than science. In either case, these explanations proposed that the mental problems arose from the mind or life […]
Dr. Mel Sabshin in Changing American Psychiatry: A Personal Perspective In this blog, I’ve spent no small amount of time going over the 1980 DSM-III and the forces that went into its creation. Just a thumbnail recap. In 1974, Dr. Melvin Sabshin became the Medical Director of the American Psychiatric Association. He had formerly been […]
GlaxoSmithKline and Roche won’t disclose their results British Medical Journal by Peter Gøtzsche 5 March 2013 GlaxoSmithKline and Roche have declared they are willing to disclose their trial data. But not like the European Medicines Agency, which from January 2014 will provide public access to the full clinical study reports for all new drugs, the […]
This blog began in 2005. It was a Christmas present from my daughter. She named it 1boringoldman because on a former blog with two other friends that was supposed to be news about our retirements, the only person writing was me, and I could only talk about one thing – the Invasion of Iraq. A […]
Kraepelin [1856-1926] Jaspers [1883-1969] Freud [1856-1939] If you know of Karl Jaspers, you were probably one of those philosophy majors who read his commentaries on Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, knowing him as an important mid-20th century German philosopher. But he was, in fact, a psychiatrist who wrote a classic psychiatric text in 1913 at age thirty, […]