I'll just take a deep breath here because I wasn't far wrong when I opined yesterday that this story was bound to get uglier: the alleged shooter at Fort Hood, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, is a terrorist, domestic terrorist even....
Posted in Furious Seasons on November 10, 2009 12:01 AM
With all due respect to the profession of psychiatry, I need to ask why the "world's most famous psychiatrist," E. Fuller Torrey, and his group the Treatment Advocacy Center are so far completely silent on the tragedy at Fort Hood,...
Posted in Furious Seasons on November 6, 2009 12:05 AM
UPDATE: 6.29 p.m. PST. Following an Amry press conference, I've update this a bit and correct some repprting that was out there in media land. The AP is now reporting that Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, was...
Posted in Furious Seasons on November 5, 2009 04:41 PM
Much as with men, the women seeing active duty in Iraq and Afghanistan are seeing loads of post-combat PTSD, according to the New York Times. "Never before has this country seen so many women paralyzed by the psychological scars of...
Posted in Furious Seasons on November 2, 2009 12:05 AM
This incident has my blood boiling: according to documents leaked to KATU-TV in Portland, Ore., hospital security staff at Oregon Health & Science University beat a handcuffed woman after she stormed out of the ER. Here's how the station describes...
Posted in Furious Seasons on September 15, 2009 12:01 AM
A new study out in Psychiatric Services asserts that a full 60 percent of antipsychotics prescribed in the VA system in 2007 were being prescribed off-label and, in my opinion, for conditions for which there is little scientific evidence supporting...
Posted in Furious Seasons on September 11, 2009 12:03 AM
An article in today's New York Times reports on a study out of the San Francisco VA/UCSF that the prevalence of mental disorders among Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans is discouragingly high. "The researchers found that 37 percent of those...
Posted in Furious Seasons on July 17, 2009 10:23 AM
There are a few bits of news in this post but they are tough to organize: suffice to say that the politics around the forthcoming DSM-V are becoming very intense and nasty and, slightly connected, psychiatrist-bloggers Doug Bremner (Emory University)...
Posted in Furious Seasons on June 25, 2009 12:03 AM
I generally consider myself unshockable when it comes to new disorders and illnesses that some psychiatrists want to include in the DSM, but a new proposal to include bitterness in the forthcoming edition of DSM-V real shakes me up. It...
Posted in Furious Seasons on May 29, 2009 12:01 AM
There's been a fascinating two-part series in the Rio Grande Sun concerning what appears to be the over-prescribing and off-label prescribing of Seroquel to jail inmates (part one here, part two here). Were there tons of inmates with schizophrenia? Nope....
Posted in Furious Seasons on May 22, 2009 12:01 AM
It's been an interesting last two weeks or so around here: I get interviewed by Psychology Today's website two weeks ago and last week none other than the great CL Psych noted: "After a very interesting interview with Philip Dawdy,...
Posted in Furious Seasons on April 23, 2009 12:01 AM
I've noted many times in the past that current PTSD treatments seem to not be working very well, especially among combat veterans, and that we need to find another solution/s. Now comes a new study in the Journal of Psychopharmacology...
Posted in Furious Seasons on March 9, 2009 12:23 PM
Today, I am beginning the spring fundraiser for this site. Yes, I know it's still technically winter, but the fundraiser in early December was dubbed winter, so this one shall be spring. I'm starting this fundraiser five days earlier than...
Posted in Furious Seasons on February 18, 2009 12:05 AM
As I mentioned two weeks ago, the US military has determined that post-combat PTSD does not merit awarding of the Purple Heart, given to service members wounded or killed in action with an enemy. Yesterday, two separate writers responded to...
Posted in Furious Seasons on January 27, 2009 12:03 AM
Last week, the Pentagon decided, after reviewing the matter, not to allow the Purple Heart to be awarded for combat-related PTSD. While the decision is no doubt disappointing to some, the military does what it does. "But a Pentagon advisory...
Posted in Furious Seasons on January 12, 2009 12:01 AM
Last week, the New York Times had an interesting article on a large number of violent incidents, including murder, involving Iraq War vets stationed at Fort Carson, Colo. It's the usual story of post-combat stress--or PTSD, if you prefer--and an...
Posted in Furious Seasons on January 6, 2009 12:03 AM
Thanks to a reader for passing along this fascinating and saddening article from Chicago about an Iraq War veteran who's wound up homeless due to PTSD and for whom the Veteran's Administration has had a classic, All-American response: "Larson has...
Posted in Furious Seasons on November 18, 2008 10:53 AM
I've been following the discouraging saga of Iraq War vets diagnosed with PTSD who've died suddenly in their sleep, apparently as a result of some of the psych meds they were being given or due to an interaction between the...
Posted in Furious Seasons on November 13, 2008 11:43 AM
Every so often a reader passes on something that utterly surprises me and this is one of those times. According to the American Association for Health Freedom, researchers are seeing promising results using hyperbaric oxygen therapy--yes, those big chambers sometimes...
Posted in Furious Seasons on October 9, 2008 12:01 AM
Yesterday, when I posted about post-combat PTSD and said what I thought were fairly non-controversial things a flurry of comments erupted, including some that called for violence against psychiatrists and bombing the FDA. As I made clear back in February,...
Posted in Furious Seasons on September 30, 2008 12:03 AM
There is an excellent and harrowing article in the current New Yorker about a Marine staff sergeant and his brother and it ends in a murder-suicide in the Arizona desert, or double suicide, take your pick. I'm not going to...
Posted in Furious Seasons on September 29, 2008 12:03 AM
Some people have been chipping me up in comments the last week or so over my choice of words on this site. When I noted that someone "mans" a phone, I wasn't being PC enough. When I used the term...
Posted in Furious Seasons on August 8, 2008 12:03 AM
An interesting piece in today's New York Times that details drinking problems among returned troops and the utter lack of substance abuse and mental health services available to help out vets with PTSD. It's worth a read and it's kind...
Posted in Furious Seasons on July 8, 2008 01:15 PM
The Washington Times and ABC News have teamed up on an investigative report in which it's revealed that the VA has been enrolling Iraq vets and others as research subjects for drugs with dangerous side effects. Case in point: one...
Posted in Furious Seasons on June 17, 2008 08:11 AM
Over the weekend, there was a long, discouraging article in the Austin American Statesman detailing the unexplained death of a young Marine from Texas at Twentynine Palms, Calif. He'd been taking a host of meds for PTSD, including Seroquel and...
Posted in Furious Seasons on June 17, 2008 12:05 AM
From today's war is hell department comes this discouraging article from the AP. New PTSD diagnoses among troops in Iraq were up 50 percent in 2007, some of it inevitably connected to last summer's "surge" in forces around Baghdad. What...
Posted in Furious Seasons on May 28, 2008 02:42 PM
That's a claim made today by Tom Insel, head of the National Institute of Mental Health, as reported by Bloomberg. Insel appears to be forecasting into a very grim future and using recent estimates that upwards of 20 percent of...
Posted in Furious Seasons on May 5, 2008 02:49 PM
I asked readers the other day to submit contributions of whatever kind so that I could post them today while I busied myself with some outside writing. This one is by Jane Alexander, who authors the fabulous Bipolar Recovery website...
Posted in Furious Seasons on February 19, 2008 12:01 AM
First, thanks to all of you for your kind thoughts regarding my six-month anniversary of being off-meds. I happened to put the same post up on Daily Kos and got several fascinating replies, including this one from Paul Minot, a...
Posted in Furious Seasons on January 22, 2008 01:04 AM
The fine folks at the Treatment Advocacy Center had a post yesterday about how homeless shelters and the streets have come to replace many of the former state hospitals and became de facto psych units along with jails and prisons....
Posted in Furious Seasons on December 12, 2007 12:03 AM
ABC News had an interesting piece last week in which counselors working with Iraq vets with pain, PTSD and depression issues accuse the military of overmedicating troops. In some cases, soldiers are ending up addicted to painkillers. Here's one soldier's...
Posted in Furious Seasons on December 10, 2007 12:03 AM
A small squabble has broken out over a piece Bruce Levine wrote at The Huffington Post the other day. In it, Levine argues against the disease model of depression, bangs on Peter Kramer and offers: "Instead of labeling depression as...
Posted in Furious Seasons on December 3, 2007 12:11 AM
I haven't written about Mr. B. in a while. He's the Vietnam-era vet who's schizophrenic and was kicked out of his housing recently because he smokes. He has new housing now in a dicier part of town, but is still...
Posted in Furious Seasons on July 19, 2007 12:05 AM
If you caught the news yesterday, you saw or read that Sen. Barak Obama (D-Ill.), campaigning for the Democrat presidential nomination in Iowa, proposed a new health insurance system for America, one that would cover the 45 million or so...
Posted in Furious Seasons on May 30, 2007 12:03 AM
Hi. I am mostly back in action this week, barring anything unforeseen. John Grohol at Psych Central has an amazing/jaw-dropping post on just how ineffective anti-depressants are in teens and children. According to a study, only 1 out of 9...
Posted in Furious Seasons on May 29, 2007 11:25 AM
As I've noted before, the largest Army base in the US is 30 miles south of Seattle--Fort Lewis, home to the Stryker Brigade. The two dailies in Seattle have been tracking mental health issues among Fort Lewis troops fairly aggressively...
Posted in Furious Seasons on May 29, 2007 09:40 AM
CNN and NBC, the two networks I happened to watch last night, had loads of coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre last night. Most of the coverage is not worth recounting--let's just say there are a lot of stupid assumptions...
Posted in Furious Seasons on April 20, 2007 12:50 AM
There have been a couple of good, longish articles in the media recently about Iraq War veterans running afoul of the military's bizarre mental health system. In both, the soldiers suffer from PTSD and a host of other psychological ailments....
Posted in Furious Seasons on April 17, 2007 12:03 AM
Here we have yet another round of bad news for the atypical antipsychotics. In this case, the federal government's Agency for Research Healthcare and Quality is out with a study claiming that there is not enough evidence to support off-label...
Posted in Furious Seasons on January 18, 2007 02:17 AM
In what strikes me as an important post, CL Psych, is calling into question how a recent study on Seroquel's use in bipolar disorder arrived at the degree of positive effects experienced by the research subjects. Or more properly how...
Posted in Furious Seasons on December 6, 2006 12:01 AM
In recent posts, I have noted that AstraZeneca is pushing hard to turn Seroquel into the equivalent of Lithium--the go-to, gold standard, front line monotherapy treatment for bipolar disorder. Some readers have wondered whether I wasn't jumping to conclusions and,...
Posted in Furious Seasons on November 20, 2006 01:03 AM
Looks like the Veterans Administration wants to limit benefits to soldiers suffering from PTSD. Oh goodie. The Washington Post has this account....
Posted in Furious Seasons on January 3, 2006 08:59 AM
One of this blog's regular readers, in commenting on soliders returning from Iraq with mental health problems and presumptive PTSD, wrote: For me personally, my schizophrenia I've been able stand. It's the PTSD from the schizophrenia that I cannot. Living...
Posted in Furious Seasons on October 20, 2005 06:06 PM