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Posts tagged with the category Psycho-Pharmacology
The “Mental Illness” Paradigm: Itself an “Illness” That Is Out of Control
For those of you who haven’t read this recent story in The New York Times, I highly recommend it. It is essentially a woman’s (Linda Logan’s) rich and moving autobiographical account of her struggle with “bipolar disorder.” The main message that I imagine most people will take away from this story is that the...
Our Gradually Lowering Standards for Human Interaction
Computers have never passed the Turing Test, but plucky start-ups say software is ready to replace therapists anyway.
That’s according to a recent article in The Atlantic highlighting “The Digital Future of Mental Health” - which doesn’t sound like an overhyped tech-trends piece by a documentarian pushing a movie at...
Eugenics and Psychiatry: A Brief Overview of the History
In my casual observations in conversation with colleagues, I find that very few mental health professionals are aware of the historical link between psychiatry and eugenics. I was not aware of this history until relatively recently, when I read Robert Whitaker’s groundbreaking and brilliant text, Mad in America. When I read that section of the...
Must read: Paula J. Caplan says the DSM has always done more harm than good
Writing in the Washington Post, Paula Caplan recalls the story of a mother who had been labled bi-polar and put on psychiatric medication – when in fact her problems were more mundane. She was a new mother; she was sleep deprived; she was working full-time and caring for her dying grandmother.
Since the 1980s, Caplan said she has met...
This is what happens when psychology surrenders to medication
A chilling article by Salon and AlterNet exposes the devastation that prescription drug abuse is causing much of America.
For large swaths of the country, “Pill Mills” that provide mood altering drugs for the slightest excuse, are a fact of life. “Pilling” – trading drugs with family, friends and strangers for a mix-...
Grief is never "one size fits all"
Grief can hollow out a soul and pull someone down the depths of despair that can be all consuming. It is not something to ignore or to treat lightly, but grief is an inevitable in life as there are as many endings as there are beginnings.
Can grief be so painful that it would warrant a psychiatric diagnosis of major depressive disorder?
This is...
One nation, under Adderall
Americans might not be able to sit still long enough to learn that they were given 51.5 million prescriptions for Addention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in 2010.
That's about one prescription for every six Americans -- so many that pharmaceutical companies are now experiencing shortages of the medication. If this keeps up many...
Why we relapse back into depression
Are anti-depressants putting people more at risk for a relapse?
Possibly. In his latest piece to be published in the journal of Frontiers of Science, evolutionary psychologist Paul Andrews’ meta-analysis suggests that patients who use anti-depressants are more susceptible to a relapse than those who do not use them.
They analyzed research...
Neuroscience is starting to sound suspiciously like the 21st century's version of phrenology
You know a scientific field has turned into a scientific fad when it says it’s changed EVERYTHING.
Real scientific breakthroughs of that scope don’t have to announce themselves. Fake ones do, because evolutionary psychology never produced a lightbulb and “artificial intelligence” never built a car. They...
The treatments for anxiety can be much, much, worse than the "disease"
Epidemiologists suggest that some eighteen percent of the American population struggles with anxiety each year. Does that make you nervous?
What makes me nervous is that that BigPharma is handing out little white pills to deal with this problem ... and instead of helping anxiety, these pills are funding the vacation homes of corporate...
Are antidepressants accomplices to school shootings?
Do you know that the perpetrators of some of the most notorious school shootings in the world were on antidepressants?
No? I din’t think so. Most people don’t. It doesn’t get talked about very often.
But in fact Cho Seung Hui, the shooter in the Virginia Tech massacre in Blacksburg, Virginia was on...
Love is a many splendored ... chemical?
Of all the emotions, love is surely the most talked about – and the hardest to explain.
Unless you’re a neurologist, that is: January saw several publications claiming that love was entirely explainable by neurochemical reactions.
“Love: Neuroscience reveals all,” reads a headline in the journal...
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