There are many references to mental health in the House health care reform bill, 110 to be exact. Most of them use the term generically in reference to facilities and health care providers, but not so when it comes to...
Posted in Furious Seasons on October 30, 2009 12:05 AM
My wonderful cat Katie took ill last Wednesday evening, drooling all of a sudden and rapidly losing several pounds of body weight. She's been to the vet three times in the last few days, the last time for an inconclusive...
Posted in Furious Seasons on October 11, 2009 06:29 PM
Last month, I wrote of yet another case of Seroquel's growing popularity as a street drug in connection with the shooting death of a man in Massachusetts and, given how many of these Seroquel as street drug stories were popping...
Posted in Furious Seasons on July 13, 2009 08:53 AM
An FDA advisory panel yesterday voted to recommend a ban on the widely-prescribed painkillers Percocet and Vicodin. Percocet (and its kissing cousin Endocet) is actually a combination of Oxycodone, an almost century-old opioid analgesic medication synthesized from opium-derived thebaine, and...
Posted in Furious Seasons on July 1, 2009 12:03 AM
Here we go: "Life & Style reports that Michael Jackson was taking a cocktail of up to seven prescription drugs in the months before his death. "And a Jackson family lawyer told CNN he 'feared' the drugs could kill the...
Posted in Furious Seasons on June 25, 2009 07:52 PM
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
Yesterday, I was contacted by a source with vast experience in mental health systems and research, bringing to my attention patent applications filed in May 2008 in the name of the Department of Health and Human Services (meaning NIH in...
Posted in Furious Seasons on May 15, 2009 12:03 AM
There was a well-written, yet somehow problematic essay in the New York Times Sunday Magazine yesterday. It concerns the chronic, treatment resistant, suicidal depression of its author, Daphne Merkin, and her three-week hospitalization in 2008 at the New York State...
Posted in Furious Seasons on May 11, 2009 12:01 AM
I learned yesterday that the Alliance for Human Research Protection last week sent a letter to the president of Harvard University, calling for the school to order a broad-based, independent review of the work of controversial Harvard child psychiatrist Joseph...
Posted in Furious Seasons on April 21, 2009 12:01 AM
I'm sure some of you will get a chuckle out of this: in November, the International Forum on Mood and Anxiety Disorders (website) will hold its annual conference, this year in Monaco, and one of the conference topics will be...
Posted in Furious Seasons on April 17, 2009 12:01 AM
As I've reported before, Seroquel is often used by prisoners--and some civilians in the outside world--to get stoned in prison and apparently so too is Wellbutrin, the well-known anti-depressant. The Wellbutrin bit is news to me. Things have gotten so...
Posted in Furious Seasons on April 7, 2009 09:27 AM
The following is my written testimony which I submitted yesterday to the FDA's Psychopharmacology Advisory Committee. On April 8, the committee will hold a hearing on AstraZeneca's applications to have Seroquel approved for three different depression indications as well as...
Posted in Furious Seasons on March 27, 2009 12:03 AM
In a deposition in a lawsuit against J&J/Janssen, controversial Harvard child psychiatrist Joseph Biederman testified under oath and was asked what rank of professor he is at Harvard. His answer is revealing about more than Biederman. (Via the In Vivo...
Posted in Furious Seasons on March 20, 2009 01:04 PM
Everyone knew this was coming: Tuesday's edition of the wonderful Seattle Post-Intelligencer will be its last as a newspaper, ending a 140-year plus run. Seattle now becomes a one-newspaper town, although the financial status of the Seattle Times is pretty...
Posted in Furious Seasons on March 16, 2009 12:50 PM
There's a commentary in the March issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry, gingerly addressing the conflict of interest scandals roiling psychiatry--and bringing it to its knees, in the words of Tufts' University's Danny Carlat--and one of the very psychiatric...
Posted in Furious Seasons on March 4, 2009 12:01 AM
On Friday, New York Times "op-extra" columnist/blogger/sometime pharma apologist Judith Warner offered her take on news that some of those kids dumped on the State of Nebraska last year, during that state's doomed "safe haven" law experiment, were mentally ill....
Posted in Furious Seasons on February 23, 2009 12:03 AM
I've been hammering on issues around children's mental health on this site for pushing three years now and have long made the point that much of the medicating of children in our culture (and I mean prepubescent here) is happening...
Posted in Furious Seasons on February 18, 2009 12:01 AM
After putting up the original post, I went back and slightly changed the portion where I discuss RS's handling of patient accounts in the article. I had overstated something and wanted to correct it. PD Two weeks ago, I noted...
Posted in Furious Seasons on February 12, 2009 12:01 AM
Amidst the many bizarre revelations around the conflict of interest scandal around academic psychiatric researchers and Big Pharma being probed by Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) comes the oddest revelation of them all. In 2000, Emory University psychiatrist Charles Nemeroff wrote...
Posted in Furious Seasons on December 18, 2008 11:45 AM
Many of you are already aware of the two-year-old lawsuit brought by the State of Texas against J&J/Janssen over allegations that the drugmaker worked to influence the Texas Medication Algorithm Project to favor its star atypical antipsychotic Risperdal and made...
Posted in Furious Seasons on December 17, 2008 12:01 AM
The following is an op-ed by Christopher Lane, Professor of English at Northwestern University, and the author most recently of Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness. He wrote it soon after the tragic NIU massacre of Feb. 2008 and...
Posted in Furious Seasons on December 11, 2008 12:01 AM
Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) has gone and done it again: poked into a major psych researcher's payouts from Big Pharma, compared it against other required disclosures, and found some underreporting going on. This time out the bustee is none other...
Posted in Furious Seasons on September 24, 2008 10:35 AM
I don't have much to add here, but via Pharmalot we learn that John Rush--the much-published, influential University of Texas psychiatry professor--has left his role as the head of the controversial Texas Medication Algorithm Project. He's taking a job as...
Posted in Furious Seasons on September 5, 2008 12:01 AM
Over the weekend, about 1,000 pages of documents recently unsealed by an Alaskan court--which had been overseeing the recent Alaska v. Lilly case up there--hit the Internet. The documents were unsealed because of the efforts of the Bloomberg wire service...
Posted in Furious Seasons on August 18, 2008 12:03 AM
There's a good, lengthy article in yesterday's News Journal (Wilmington, Del.) on just how big a drug the atypical antipsychotic Seroquel has become ($4 billion in sales), how central it is to AstraZeneca's profits, how the drug has been widely...
Posted in Furious Seasons on August 4, 2008 12:17 PM
The New York Times is out today with an article on Sen. Charles Grassley's (R-Iowa) investigation of the deep ties between medicine and Big Pharma and in particular of the field of psychiatry. As the paper's Ben Carey and Gardiner...
Posted in Furious Seasons on July 12, 2008 11:29 AM
There was an interesting and odd article on MSN Health yesterday. Interesting because it examined the question of why different people have such wildly different responses to anti-depressants--everything from the classic "better than well" response to no response to violence...
Posted in Furious Seasons on May 30, 2008 12:03 AM
I've complained on this site before about the odd phenomenon of Google searches for "seroquel snorting," "shooting seroquel" and the like coming to this site, principally because I have made stray mentions in the past of the drug's underground status...
Posted in Furious Seasons on May 21, 2008 12:19 AM
Most of you are well aware that AstraZeneca has been trotting out data--not especially impressive data BTW--touting its antipsychotic Seroquel as a treatment for depression and generalized anxiety disorder. The drug is already approved for treating schizophrenia, mania in bipolar...
Posted in Furious Seasons on May 8, 2008 12:03 AM
I'd planned a series of posts today on all sorts of things, but I got waylaid last night after going to an old friend's for dinner. We were sitting in her yard in some very brief evening sunshine and she...
Posted in Furious Seasons on April 22, 2008 09:08 AM
There's been quite a rush of researchers lately proclaiming that they've developed a genetic test that will tell someone if they have bipolar disorder. The latest example comes straight out of my old stomping grounds of San Diego where John...
Posted in Furious Seasons on March 25, 2008 12:05 AM
I admire the courage of the many Tibetans who are rising up against the Chinese government. There are conflicting reports of how much violence is taking place, but you should have no doubt that the Chinese will do whatever is...
Posted in Furious Seasons on March 17, 2008 09:53 AM
The reaction in the British press to last week's bombshell study on the weakness of anti-depressants continues. For a study that supposedly told us something we already knew, it's getting a lot of attention. One doctor has even written a...
Posted in Furious Seasons on March 3, 2008 12:03 AM
It's ironic that today marks my seven month anniversary of going off-meds because the phenomenon of going off-meds--well, anti-depressants at any rate--is very much in the media these days due to the NIU shooting. More on that in a second....
Posted in Furious Seasons on February 20, 2008 12:05 AM
I am still overwhelmed by a couple of things from last evening, so I'll be late with posts today. A big bunch of my life was spent in New Jersey, I am a longtime New York Giants fan, and yesterday's...
Posted in Furious Seasons on February 4, 2008 12:57 AM
I know I am going to anger a lot of my readers by writing this, but sometimes things have just got to be said. So here goes. Richard Friedman, a Cornell psychiatrist, pens one of those weird opinion pieces that...
Posted in Furious Seasons on January 15, 2008 12:29 AM
There was a fascinating exchange of letters in this month's American Journal of Psychiatry concerning just how much depression doctors should accept in their patients and the implications of such decisions. What prompted the initial letter was the federally-funded STAR-D...
Posted in Furious Seasons on January 10, 2008 02:50 AM
PBS' "Frontline" took on the controversies around the bipolar child paradigm and medicated children last night. I was at work and did not see the program, so I have no opinion of it. You can watch it online here. I'd...
Posted in Furious Seasons on January 9, 2008 12:40 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
I had a bad bit of news yesterday--unexpected and deeply disappointing, professionally and financially--and so I had to spend much of yesterday afternoon and evening doing all the mindfulness, self-awareness kinds of things that those of us who've actually learned...
Posted in Furious Seasons on November 20, 2007 12:58 AM
The New York Times' Judith Warner had an interesting blog post yesterday on what she calls the Ritalin Wars, Ritalin being shorthand for medicating any and all children with behavioral "deficits." She's responding to the news earlier in the week...
Posted in Furious Seasons on November 16, 2007 01:42 PM
On Tuesday, CBS News had an investigation on just how many active military and veterans are committing suicide, and the numbers are sobering, if not shocking. There were 188 suicides among active personnel in 2006, and most news organizations would've...
Posted in Furious Seasons on November 15, 2007 12:03 AM
I forgot to post this interesting bit from the "Well" blog on the New York Times' website the other day. As most of you know, America seems to have all kinds of problems with getting to sleep these days--goodness, you...
Posted in Furious Seasons on November 9, 2007 12:01 AM
I've been thinking a bit lately about the nature of what we call mental illness in our culture, primarily because many people diagnosed with schizophrenia in the UK are pushing to have the label schizophrenia changed to something else (I'll...
Posted in Furious Seasons on November 6, 2007 12:05 AM
Sally Satel, a Washington D.C. psychiatrist and conservative policy wonk on mental health issues, had an op-ed in yesterday's New York Times. It's hard to tell what drove the paper to run an op-ed on the DSM right now. All...
Posted in Furious Seasons on September 14, 2007 12:05 AM
Most of you already know that the CDC released data yesterday showing a rise in the teen suicide rate in the US in 2004. Of particular concern was an increase in suicides among girls aged 10 to 14 years old....
Posted in Furious Seasons on September 7, 2007 01:42 AM
David Miklowitz, a psychologist at the University of Colorado, has begun a study to determine if family-focused therapy, of which his is the father, can work to prevent bipolar disorder from developing in kids. While the evidence is mixed that...
Posted in Furious Seasons on September 5, 2007 12:03 AM
Someone over on a MySpace blog recounts the crushing fatigue they're running into on Cymbalta. Along with suicidality, it's one of the more prominent injuries--ooops, I mean side effects!--of the anti-depressant. Less well-known are other injuries such as liver damage....
Posted in Furious Seasons on July 13, 2007 12:05 AM
David Carr, a media columnist for the New York Times, former alt-weekly editor and one of the genuine good sorts in the journalism world, had an interesting piece yesterday wherein he examined his first brush with the health care blogosphere...
Posted in Furious Seasons on June 12, 2007 12:07 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
I have watched with growing worry the last few weeks as a buttload of commentators have taken a swing at the Virginia Tech massacre and the question of violence among the mentally ill (this chatter always assumes of course that...
Posted in Furious Seasons on May 7, 2007 12:05 AM
Stephany at soulful sepulcher has an outstanding post up today ask why the FDA is in rush to assess safety of cold meds in kids but not antipsychotics: "'We have no data on these agents of what's a safe and...
Posted in Furious Seasons on March 9, 2007 07:22 PM
A neighbor of mine, whom I'll call B., is about to be evicted from his apartment here in Seattle. He's 61 years old and has had schizophrenia since he was in his early-20s. But I'll come back to that problem...
Posted in Furious Seasons on March 8, 2007 12:01 AM
I would be remiss if I didn't pass along some links to interesting posts that others are doing on mental health and such. Especially since CL Psych has several posts up that are amazing. Just read them here, here and...
Posted in Furious Seasons on January 19, 2007 12:12 PM
There is a remarkable letter to the editor in this month's American Journal of Psychiatry about Seroquel abuse in an Ohio prison, especially involving the snorting of crushed up tablets. In the joint, the atypical antipsychotic has earned the street...
Posted in Furious Seasons on January 4, 2007 12:01 AM
I used to spend lots of time in the MySpace bipolar groups, principally because I know how scary and isolating it can be to be diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and I wanted to encourage people there--young and middle-aged alike--that bipolar...
Posted in Furious Seasons on November 29, 2006 12:01 AM
Each time I see an article on mental health that's datelined Indianapolis I get suspicious. That's where Eli Lilly is headquartered. The company makes and markets famous or infamous, depending on your view, psych meds such as Prozac, Zyprexa ("opening...
Posted in Furious Seasons on November 28, 2006 12:01 AM
I've meant to link to this post of Liz Spikol's for a couple of days, because it says much of what I've tried to get at on this blog for the last 9 months only Liz does it with 10...
Posted in Furious Seasons on June 30, 2006 12:04 AM
When I spoke with Pete Earley last week, we both wound up lamenting the level of politics in the mental health advocacy world and that we had both brushed up against it recently. Earley told me that NMHA had refused...
Posted in Furious Seasons on May 24, 2006 12:01 AM
The Treatment Advocacy Center’s executive director Mary T. Zdanowicz had an op-ed on Sunday in the Washington Post. It’s not a bad piece, but of course I have some nits to pick in a moment. And yeah this is going...
Posted in Furious Seasons on May 23, 2006 12:01 AM
And his problem is me. Or more accurately, my willingness to be skeptical about a statistic he cited in his Washington Post op-ed of May 12. In it, he asserted that "people with mental illnesses kill law enforcement officers at...
Posted in Furious Seasons on May 16, 2006 01:07 AM
Here's a new study claiming that in Canada 56 percent of people with depression seek help from a doc or mental health care provider while in the US it's 52 percent. The study size is smallish--only 150 people in Canada,...
Posted in Furious Seasons on May 11, 2006 12:08 AM
The first of this week's STAR-D papers is the one the media bit on the hardest. The dominant message is that the paper by John Rush et al. shows that patients just need to keep switching meds until they find...
Posted in Furious Seasons on March 24, 2006 12:04 AM
Hunter S. Thompson killed himself a year ago today. I was disappointed and crushed and went to a bar soon after I heard the news that evening. I drank whisky and came to understand why he did it. He'd been...
Posted in Furious Seasons on February 20, 2006 12:02 AM
As I've written elsewhere, marijuana has long been thought to have anti-depressant properties. Lester Grinspoon, an emeritus psych prof at Harvard, has been saying this since the 1950s. Many in the psych profession have written him off as a quack,...
Posted in Furious Seasons on December 14, 2005 12:23 AM