Fall Fundraiser

It's been a little over three months since I began the last fundraiser for this site and so I come before all you dear readers again to ask you to contribute what you can to helping fund my work on this site. The goal for this fundraiser is $3,000 over the next two weeks. There's a PayPal button on the right. If you prefer snail mail, send me an email and I'll give you my mailing address.

I appreciate your support.

Since the late spring fundraiser one thing has become apparent to me about media coverage of mental health issues in the US--it's disappearing. What with repeated layoffs at newspapers across the country (approximately 3,500 print reporters have lost their jobs since January 1) and the consequent reshuffling in how newspapers cover issues other than politics and sports, mental health issues have been pushed to the backburner at almost every newspaper I can think of (excepting the New York Times). It's been quite a while since I've read regular coverage of these issues in the Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times, for example. TV news is of course a lost cause on this front. The AP and Reuters and the Wall Street Journal do cover bits and pieces here and there, but when it comes to day-in, day-out coverage of mental health, it's pretty much fallen to the Times and this website plus a few others to keep tabs on what's going on out there.

Among other things, since June 1 I've outed researchers for seeking to link depression to every physical malady in human kind, noted attempts to get Cymbalta approved for pain treatment, got the FDA to publicly reveal that it considers pediatric bipolar disorder to be a valid diagnosis, reported on adverse events experienced by pediatric patients taking antipsychotics (data the FDA is apparently ignoring), outed an FDA official over conflicts of interest around pediatric bipolar disorder, continued to press the FDA to define pediatric bipolar disorder, reported on new details of how Lilly marketed Zyprexa to PCPs, and smacked up the Wall Street Journal for an article on schizophrenia. It was a busy summer, so busy I didn't even take a vacation.

I'm a long way from perfection, but I'm doing my best to fill an unacceptable information gap that's grown up around mental health issues in our culture. Hopefully, I'm doing it in such a way that it merits your support of this site's fall fundraiser.

Yes, I know it's still summer, but Labor Day is over and the weather in Seattle has sure felt like fall for two weeks, so I'm calling this the fall fundraiser.