Psychiatry:
In 1965, Senator Robert Kennedy visited several "institutions for the mentally retarded" in New York State. His descriptions of the conditions he found there, which were published widely in the media, shocked the American public and angered those in charge...
Posted on June 20, 2008 4:15 AM • 1 Comments •
This week's issue of Time has a cover story called America's Medicated Army, about the increasing use of antidepressant and anti-anxiety drugs among U.S. troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.The article quotes figures from a recent report by the Army's...
Posted on June 10, 2008 1:17 PM • 2 Comments •
SciCurious has written an interesting post about Sigmund Freud's experiments with cocaine. Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, was also a pioneer of psychopharmacology; as well as being one of the first to scientifically investigate the properties and effects of cocaine,...
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Posted on May 30, 2008 9:25 PM • 8 Comments •
A forthcoming PBS documentary called The Lobotomist examines the career of psychiatrist Walter J. Freeman, who performed nearly 3,000 "ice pick" lobotomies during the late 1930s and 1940s.The hour-long program, which is partly based on Jack El-Hai's book of the...
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Posted on January 15, 2008 5:48 PM • 0 Comments •
A lengthy article in last weekend's Washington Post Magazine discusses the work of Michael Mithoefer, a psychiatrist at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) who has almost completed the first phase of a clinical study into the use of...
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Posted on November 27, 2007 2:36 PM • 3 Comments •
The introductory chapter of Manic-Depressive Illness: Bipolar Disorders and Recurrent Depression, by Frederick K. Goodwin and Kay Redfield Jamison, provides an excellent description of how Emil Kraepelin first classified manic depression (or bipolar disorder) and related conditions in the late...
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Posted on November 7, 2007 12:36 PM • 1 Comments •
In an op-ed from yesterday's NY Times, Christopher Lane, a professor of English at Northwestern University, argues that shy kids are not mentally ill, and that they shouldn't be given medication. The piece brought to mind this critique of the...
Posted on September 22, 2007 3:47 PM • 18 Comments •
A study by a team of German researchers shows that the brains of paedophiles respond differently to those of healthy controls to erotic images. Martin Walter, of the Department of Psychiatry at Otto-von-Guricke University in Magdeburg, and his colleagues used...
Posted on September 21, 2007 9:27 AM • 7 Comments •
This drawing is a 4-year-old boy's depiction of Hurricane Katrina. It is one of 50 drawings, photographs and sculptures that went on display yesterday at the New Orleans Museum of Art, as part of an exhibition called Katrina -...
Posted on September 17, 2007 7:00 AM • 2 Comments •
This week, I've received three books which I'll be writing about in the near future: My Lobotomy, by Howard Dully and Charles Fleming. Dully was lobotomized at the age of 12 at the behest of his stepmother - that's him...
Posted on September 15, 2007 5:15 PM • 3 Comments •
