Recently in Psychiatry Category

Scientific American

By John Horgan

May 4, 2013

What is mental illness? Schizophrenia? Autism? Bipolar disorder? Depression? Since the 1950s, the profession of psychiatry has attempted to provide definitive answers to these questions in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Often called The Bible of psychiatry, the DSM serves as the ultimate authority for diagnosis, treatment and insurance coverage of mental illness.

Now, in a move sure to rock psychiatry, psychology and other fields that address mental illness, the director of the National Institutes of Mental Health has announced that the federal agency–which provides grants for research on mental illness–will be “re-orienting its research away from DSM categories.” Thomas Insel’s statement comes just weeks before the scheduled publication of the DSM-V, the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Insel writes:

“While DSM has been described as a ‘Bible’ for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been ‘reliability’–each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity. Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure. In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever. Indeed, symptom-based diagnosis, once common in other areas of medicine, has been largely replaced in the past half century as we have understood that symptoms alone rarely indicate the best choice of treatment. Patients with mental disorders deserve better.”

GreenMedInfo

April 24th 2013

By: Margie King, Health Coach

Omega 3 fatty acids in the form of fish oil pills have become a popular supplement for their heart health benefits. But fish oil is also good for your head. Research shows that omega 3 fatty acids may be beneficial for treating serious mood disorders, stress, and even alcohol abuse.

Researchers at the Indiana University School of Medicine conducted a multi-year study which showed conclusive behavioral and molecular benefits when omega 3 fatty acids were given to mice with bipolar disorder. The fatty acid DHA (docosahexaenoic acid) , which is one of the main active ingredients in fish oil, "normalized their behavior," according to Alexander B. Niculescu, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of psychiatry and the lead author of the study.

The study which was reported in the journal Translational Psychiatry, found that mice with characteristic bipolar symptoms including being depressed and, when subjected to stress, becoming manic, responded well to the DHA in fish oil.

PreventDisease

April 11, 2013

by MARCO TORRES

That’s the conclusion of a large cohort study from the Netherlands which compared generational shifts in a range of well established metabolic risk factors for cardiovascular disease. Assessing the trends, the investigators concluded that “the more recently born generations are doing worse”, and warn “that the prevalence of metabolic risk factors and the lifelong exposure to them have increased and probably will continue to increase”.

Life expectancy at birth rose by a few years for both men and women in the last two decades of the 20th century. This has come at an enormous cost in the quality of life of our elders, for they are suffering with more pain and greater disability than ever before in last 15 years of life. People globally are living longer but chronic debilitating conditions are becoming more prevalent.

A recent Global Burden of Disease Study 2010 involved 486 authors in 50 countries who aimed to offer a comprehensive update on diseases and injuries since the last such report in 1990. It found the leading risk factor accounting for the disease burden in most developed nations is diet.

Huffington Post

By Peter Breggin

April 7, 2013

Click here to read an original op-ed from the TED speaker who inspired this post and watch the TEDTalk below.

Ben Goldacre’s TEDTalk describes the selective bias in research and publishing which strongly favors articles with positive outcomes. In my field of psychiatry, this bias is only the tip of the iceberg. In many cases, the articles are not even written by the scientists whose names appear on them. They are “ghostwritten” by drug company minions.

In my role as a medical expert in product liability lawsuits against drug companies, judges have empowered me to dig into the otherwise secret interiors of drug company data vaults. The following observations have been generated during my forensic investigations and have been documented in my books and scientific articles.

Published articles about psychiatric drugs frequently fail to reflect the actual results of the study. After the FDA rejected an antidepressant clinical trial for failing to demonstrate effectiveness, the pharmaceutical company authored a paper based on the same study that was manipulated to show a positive outcome. In another example, a major journal editor was complicit with a drug company in publishing an article about a benzodiazepine tranquilizer that emphasized its supposed effectiveness at six weeks. But the study had lasted an additional two weeks, at which time many of the patients had become addicted to the drug and were suffering from greater than before starting the medication.

WorldNetDaily
By Garth Kant
April 2, 2013

CDC director: 'Misuse appears to be growing at an alarming rate'

“Those are astronomical numbers. I’m floored”“Those are astronomical numbers. I’m floored,” Dr. William Graf, a pediatric neurologist, Professor at the Yale School of Medicine

More than a decade after a national scandal regarding the over-prescription of Ritalin and similar drugs to millions of American children diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now reports a far higher rate of diagnosis than a decade ago.

An astounding 19 percent of high school-age boys – ages 14 to 17 – in the U.S. have been diagnosed with ADHD and about 10 percent are taking medication for it. Ten percent of high school-age girls have likewise been diagnosed.

Fifteen percent of all school-age boys have been diagnosed with ADHD and 7 percent of all school-age girls. That makes a total of 11 percent of all school-aged children in the U.S. diagnosed with ADHD.

The CDC survey completed last year found an estimated 6.4 million children ages 4 to 17 had been diagnosed at some point, a 53 percent increase over the past decade.

Approximately two-thirds of those currently diagnosed have been prescribed drugs such as Ritalin or Adderall. Those drugs can help patients with both mild and severe symptoms, but they can also cause addiction, anxiety and psychosis.

CCHR International

By Kelly Patricia O’Meara

March 11, 2013

Photo: Garry Mcleod; Origami: Robert Lang – from Wired Magazine, “Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness”

In 1952, the first hydrogen bomb was detonated and the American Psychiatric Association, APA, published its first book of mental illnesses: the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM .

No one, then, could have imagined that this seemingly innocuous manual would be more destructive, and result in producing more victims, than a nuclear weapon.

Since then the DSM has mushroomed and with each revised DSM untold millions carry the scars from its devastating effects.

Oddly enough, governments seem oblivious to the fallout of psychiatry’s arbitrary and devastating mental illness labels. Why? Could the answer lie in the extraordinarily profitable relationship between psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industrial complex?

cchrint.org

Natural News

By Peter Breggin, Psychiatrist, Author

March 20, 2013

There have been recent calls for a national Mental Health Registry, and then additional calls to link such a registry to gun licensing. In the dreadful wake of Newtown, both the left and the right and the current US federal administration are demanding that we tighten mental health statutes to make it easier and even mandatory for health care providers including psychiatrists and psychotherapists to incarcerate people on suspicion of perpetrating violence.

In a recent blog, I evaluated all the ways psychiatry and individual psychiatrists already have too much authority to lock up American citizens. I’ve pointed out how ineffective that power has proven in preventing violence.

Indeed, as many are now learning, psychiatric drugs can cause violence and have contributed to school shootings and other mayhem. Here I want to remind and to warn that psychiatry has been and continues to be the cause of some of the greatest abuses in the Western World. In the aftermath of the school shootings, psychiatry should not be allowed to garner even more power.

ProPublica / By Tracy Weber, Charles Ornstein

March 12, 2013

How the pharmaceutical industry bribes medical professionals.

Update Mar. 11, 2013, 4:55 pm: This post has been updated to reflect a response by Dr. Vladimir Maletic to questions from ProPublica.

Dr. Jon W. Draud, the medical director of psychiatric and addiction medicine at two Tennessee hospitals, pursues some eclectic passions. He’s bred sleek Basenji hunting dogs for show. And last summer, the Tennessee State Museum featured “African Art: The Collection of Jon Draud.”

But the Nashville psychiatrist is also notable for a professional pursuit: During the last four years, the 47-year-old Draud has earned more than $1 million for delivering promotional talks and consulting for seven drug companies.

By a wide margin, Draud’s earnings make him the best-paid speaker in ProPublica’s Dollars for Docs database, which has been updated to include more than $2 billion in payments from 15 drugmakers for promotional speaking, research, consulting, travel, meals and related expenses from 2009 to 2012.

Gaia Health

March 11, 2013

Antidepressants are routinely prescribed after cardiac bypass surgeries. There’s no consideration for their adverse effects, nor do they consider that depression after such surgery is a reasonable emotion, nor do they bother to consider whether a patient actually is depressed. As a result, Larry, a happy-go-lucky man, died.

Heart Sun Cloud, by Aivaras Čiurlionis (cropped)

by Leonie Fennell

Meet Larry, 63. He’s Tony’s brother. He underwent a ‘triple bypass’ operation last Christmas, which involved spending 26 days in the Mater hospital, Dublin. Open heart surgery is known to be a very serious procedure, not least because the sternum, which is opened during surgery, can take up to 12 weeks to heal. Cardiologists acknowledge that heart surgery is life-changing, both physically and emotionally.

World Truth.tv

By: Lawrence Hunter, Contributor

This article was originally posted on the 'Forbes' website, but it was removed within a few days: The article is no longer available to read but thank you 'Google's cache' for catching a snapshot of the page as it appeared on Jan 14, 2013 16:16:57. It got 2000 shares on Facebook before Forbes deleted the article. Makes you wonder what is "Forbes" hiding?

In 2000, New York legislators recognized the ubiquitous and unambiguous connection between violence, especially gun violence and mass murder, and the widespread prescribed use of psychiatric drugs. Senate Bill 7035 was introduced in the New York State Senate that year requiring police agencies to report to the Department of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS) on certain crimes and suicides committed by a person who is using psychiatric drugs, including assault, homicide, sex offenses, robbery offenses, firearms and other dangerous weapons offenses, kidnapping and arson. The preamble to the bill read, in part:

There is a large body of scientific research establishing a connection between violence and suicide and the use of psychotropic drugs in some cases. This research, which has been published in peer reviewed publications such as the American Journal of Psychiatry, The Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and The Journal of Forensic Science, has shown, among other things, that: certain drugs can induce mania (a psychosis which can produce bizarre, grandiose and highly elaborated destructive plans, including mass murder);. . .and certain drugs can produce an acute psychotic reaction in an individual not previously psychotic.