psychiatry
ddobbs | September 15, 2009OK. Animals first, then everybody else.
(Other) Animals
Want Your Own Dinosaur? Place Your Bids
Jellyfish numbers rise My son and I saw this last year when we were at the EuroScience conference (highly recomennded) in Barcelona (ditto). The beaches had warnings of whole rafts of these. Determined to get wet in the Med, I dipped my toes.
Forget Apple, Here's the Real Snow Leopard
Everybody else
Top soldiers denounce torture.
Earlier Model of Human Brain's Energy Usage Underestimated Its Efficiency Covered heavily, but maybe you missed it.
Alison Bass, whose book "Side Effects" just…
ddobbs | September 14, 2009I regret I can't treat at more, um, length, the following weighty matters:
Size Matters; So Do Lies Nate Silver finds that Matt Kibbe, the president of FreedomWorks, speaking of the 9/12 tea party rally in DC, " did the equivalent of telling people that his penis is 53 inches long."
Dr. Nobody Again Questions JAMA Disclosure Policies in which Philip Dawdy and Jonathan Leo, a dangerous combination, butt heads with JAMA
Self-Destruct Button, Activiated! Baucus and Conrad decide maybe Joe Wilson had a point after all. Swine Flu Mystery in Healthy Young Puts Focus on Genetics, Deep Inhaling (…
ddobbs | September 11, 2009The ever-valuable Neuroskeptic, channeling Stanley Kowalski ("I knew a girl once said she was the glamorous type. She said to me, 'I am the glamourous type.' I said, 'So what?'"), asks just WTH it means to show that brain scans of earthquake survivors show that "trauma alters brain function."
The authors link their findings to previous work with frankly vague statements such as "The increased regional activity and reduced functional connectivity in frontolimbic and striatal regions occurred in areas known to be important for emotion processing". But anatomically speaking, most of the brain…
ddobbs | September 9, 2009For research she's doing about public attitudes on genetics and mental health, science writer Virginia Hughes is trying to get people to take a very short survey (I just took it; takes about 30 seconds) on that subject. Do mental health issues rise from genes, environment, or both? Would you get a child tested for a gene said to confer a certain level of risk for, say, autism? Questions like that. She'll use the results to inform her writing and her participation in a panel on ethical questions about the genomics of psych conditions at an upcoming conference at Cold Spring Harbor.
It's quick…
ddobbs | September 8, 2009From my wanderings. We'll start with the happy stuff
Salmon return to Paris! (photo: Charles Bremner, deep in Paris)
Mind Hacks tours some really old brains.
Zuska speaks wisely of health care reform.
The Guardian serves up some glass viruses (smallpox is pictured above).
Neuroskeptic covers a paper that is both encouraging, in its finding that EEG seems to predict antidepressant response, and infuriating, in that it withholds the information anyone else would need to replicate it. NOT GOOD.
The Wall Street Journal checks out cool tools to track the flu.
j7uy5 | September 8, 2009Poets on Prozac is the short title of a book by
psychiatrist-poet Richard M. Berlin, MD. The full title is: Poets
on Prozac: Mental Illness, Treatment, and the Creative Process.
Berlin was an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of
Massachusetts Medical School; now he's in private practice, and a
Senior Affiliate at U Mass. And a writer. His personal
website is here.
A sample of his work is
href="http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/extract/296/7/737">here;
After Reading Music From Apartment 8
for John Stone, MD
When I started out in medicine,
before I married and…
ddobbs | September 2, 2009On the radar of late:
Neuroskeptic ponders reports that antidepressant use in the U.S. has doubled in the last decade. As he notes, perhaps the most troubling thing finding in the study is that
the number of Americans using an antipsychotic as well as an antidepressant increased by a factor of more than 3. This is, frankly, extremely troubling, since antipsychotics are by far the worst psychiatric drugs in terms of side effects. There is evidence that some antipsychotics can be of use in depression as an add-on to antidepressants, but there is better evidence for other alternatives, such as…
Furious Seasons: Researcher who claimed 3-year-olds get depressed may have undisclosed industry ties
ddobbs | August 31, 2009If nothing else, this points out the need to clarify what "past 5 years" means in declaring history of possible conflicts of interest. 5 years before publication -- or research and writing? Presumably there's a difference, if we're specifyng a time frame anyway
j7uy5 | August 19, 2009It is refreshing to see something like this. Both drugs are
available as generics, so the financial motivation for a study like
this is not great. But the clinical benefit could e substantial,
albeit for a small subset of patients.
Clozapine is considered to be the most efficacious antipsychotic
medication, in that it is the drug to which the highest percentage of
persons with psychosis have a positive response. It is, however,
considered a third-line drug. The reason is that about 1% of
patients will develop severe granulocytopenia. So, in general, a
patient will be tried on at least…
j7uy5 | August 13, 2009I haven't been a good blog-citizen lately. And no, it is not
because of fatigue. Anyway, I've going to try to get back to
looking at other people's blogs more, and not just here at
ScienceBlogs.
Dr. Serani kindly
href="http://drdeborahserani.blogspot.com/2009/08/5-reasons-you-may-be-tired.html">pointed
out an
href="http://www.parade.com/health/2008/10/5-reasons-you-may-be-tired">article
on common causes of fatigue. Sleep disorders, thyroid problems,
diabetes, depression, and anemia.
My comment of this has to do with how these problems are screened for
in general medical…
ddobbs | August 2, 2009
I just finished reading Erica Goode's Times story on the suicides of four soldiers who served together in a small North Carolina-based Guard unit in Iraq from 2006 to spring 2007. This is a witheringly painful story. Goode, who has done quite a bit of science writing as well as substantial reporting from Baghdad, tells it with an unusual freshness of perspective and clarity of vision.
She starts where I suppose she must:
On Dec. 9, 2007, Sergeant Blaylock, heavily intoxicated, lifted a 9-millimeter handgun to his head during an argument with his girlfriend and pulled the trigger. He was 26…
j7uy5 | July 27, 2009Natalie Angier has another
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/21/science/21angier.html?sq=behavior%20what%20animals%20do&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print">interesting
article in the NYT. In the article, she discusses the meaning
of the word behavior. Apparently, this all came from the
realization that even standard works on the subject did not contain a
"point-by-point definition."
The realization came to
href="http://dlevitis.org/dlevitis/Research.html">Dan Levitis, a
grad student in zoology at Berkeley. Levitis happens to have a
Blogspot blog: Blog of
Science; he's…
j7uy5 | July 16, 2009A friend sent me a link to an article about the upcoming fifth edition
of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual. The article speaks of flaws in the process, and warning
of dire "unintended consequences."
href="http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/print/article/10168/1425378?printable=true">
href="http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/print/article/10168/1425378?printable=true">A
Warning Sign on the Road to DSM-V: Beware of Its Unintended Consequences
Allen Frances, MD
June 26, 2009
Psychiatric Times
...I believe that the work on DSM-V has displayed the most…
ddobbs | July 8, 2009
Ed Yong, echoed by Mike the Mad biologist PhysioProf asks what the heck investigative science journalism would look like. I hope to write more extensively on this soon. In the meantime, a few observations:
To ponder this question -- and to do investigative reporting -- I think it helps to have a sense of the history of science, which embeds in a writer or observer a sense of critical distance and an eye for large forces at work beneath the surface. Machinations in government surprise no one who has studied the history of government and politics. Likewise with science.
Science -- the search…
ddobbs | July 7, 2009Scientific American has a good story by Edmund S. Higgins suggesting that might be the case. As the story notes, the evidence for such a toll is still preliminary. But the story's opening, which tells of a parent seemingly overeager to medicate a child who didn't need it, gives an idea of why the question is more important than we might like.:
At the time of this visit, the boy was off the medication, and I conducted a series of cognitive and behavioral tests on him. He performed wonderfully. I also noticed that off the medication he was friendly and playful. On a previous casual encounter,…
ddobbs | July 7, 2009As prominent neuroscientist Jane Costello resigns in protest from the DSM-V committee, Danny Carlat says the process near meltdown:
The Fifth Coming of DSM threatens to rend the fabric of American psychiatry. Let's hope some cool heads in the APA's leadership can find a way out of this mess.
Stay tuned. The DSM isn't just a workbook; it's the theoretical framework and the de-facto prescription guideline for American psychiatry. This level of disagreement and polarization only deepens my belief that the discipline is at crisis point and a crossroads -- and in the nasty, scratchy fight over…
j7uy5 | July 6, 2009Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) has been controversial, as
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/16/AR2009031602913.html">noted
in the Washington Post.
Admittedly, most of the controversy has been contrived.
Fortunately, the process is moving forward; there is no meaningful
opposition at this point.
A good summary of the objections of this was posted by Hilzoy at
href="http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2009_05/018133.php">Political
Animal. I'll deal with the objections simply by posting the
link, as refuting them is not the…
ddobbs | July 4, 2009In case you missed them (or miss them, and want to read again ...)
The (Illusory) Rise and Fall of the "Depression Gene"
DIY circumcision with nail clippers Go figure.
Oliver Sacks meets Jon Stewart
Wheels come off psychiatric manual; APA blames road conditions
Alarming climate change chart of the day
Swine flu count in US hits 1 million; can't wait till flu season!
Will government involvement drive up health-care costs?
What if you could predict PTSD in combat troops? Oh, who cares...
ddobbs | June 30, 2009I have suspected for some time now that the band oddly close process designed to produce the DSM-V --- the diagnostic statistical manual that is psychiatry's diagnostic guide and Bible --- would create an explosion of some sort. But I didn't think it would explode quite so soon.
As Daniel Carlat outlines in a wonderful post â a must read, very high infotainment value â this is a pretty entertaining missing match. We have Allen Frances, a prominent psychiatrist who helped produce the previous edition of the DSM, leveling some very harsh criticisms of the process designed to produce a new…
j7uy5 | June 29, 2009Psychology is turning out to be a rather important field these
days. Nate Hagens has a post on The Oil Drum,
href="http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5519">The Psychological and
Evolutionary Roots of Resource Overconsumption Revisited. He
reviews the evolutionary psychology of poor economic
decision-making. Calculated Risk has a post,
href="http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2009/06/scientific-american-bubbles-and-busts.html">Scientific
American: Bubbles and Busts. It's based on an article in Scientific
American (
href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-science-of-…