Pat Deegan reflects on her own experience an shares about the need for hope in recovery: He said, I should retire from life and avoid stress. I have come to call my psychiatrist's pronouncement a "prognosis of doom". He was condemning me to a life of handicaptivity wherein I was expected to take high dose … Continue reading Hope and Recovery
Category: Mental Health
Coming of Age on Zoloft
An interesting take on anti-depressants from a writer who has benefited from them: The mainstreaming of medication has bred confusion about what’s normal. In some sectors, we’ve grown so vigilant about the possibility of having a mental disorder that this vigilance becomes counterproductive, a source of anxiety in itself. Every negative emotion becomes a potential sign or … Continue reading Coming of Age on Zoloft
Integrated care?
Pat Deegan bites her nails at the prospect of integrated care for mental health care (The same thing is happening with addiction treatment): Is recovery going the way of the dinosaur? Is recovery-transformation an old idea that should give way to more enlightened policies of integrated, co-located behavioral and physical healthcare services? These days, I … Continue reading Integrated care?
When the bubble bursts
A while back, a colleague introduced me to Shattered Assumptions. The book posits that we are able to engage in our day to day life because we assume: The world is benevolent The world is meaningful The self is worthy When a traumatic event destroys these assumptions, rebuilding them is a task that is central … Continue reading When the bubble bursts
Depression, exercise, research and the media
A recent study on treating depression with exercise encouragement and advice has caused quite a stir. Check out the headlines. But the paper itself says the following: The main implication of our results is that advice and encouragement to increase physical activity is not an effective strategy for reducing symptoms of depression. Although our intervention increased … Continue reading Depression, exercise, research and the media
Life long?
Yesterday morning I re-posted from an article on the positive finding publication bias in psychology journals and how these findings live on in spite of the fact that they are never replicated and rely on shakey analysis. [audio: http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcast.thisamericanlife.org/podcast/436.mp3%5D Then, I'm driving to work and listen to last week's episode of This American Life discussing psychopaths. It … Continue reading Life long?
Addiction diagnoses to rise
I've posted before about problems with the proposed approach to addiction in the DSM-5. These changes were intended to clear up language problems, specifically the conflation of dependence and addiction leading to "false positives" for addiction. Looks like the DSM-5 is causing its own language problems before it's even adopted. [emphasis mine] Many scholars believe … Continue reading Addiction diagnoses to rise
ADHD overdiagnosed
A recent study look at diagnostic reliability of ADHD: RESULTS: Many mental health practitioners seem to proceed heuristically and base their decisions on unclear rules of thumb. The respondents more readily diagnosed ADHD when the case involved a male patient and presented prototypical symptoms, such as impulsiveness, motoric restlessness, and lack of concentration. They were, … Continue reading ADHD overdiagnosed
Racial disparities in antidepressant prescriptions
A study on racial disparities in antidepressant prescribing: A research group at the University of Michigan and Indiana University concluded that physicians were 1.52 times more likely to prescribe antidepressants to Caucasians than to Hispanics for the same major depressive disorders. ... The researchers also found that whites were more likely to be prescribed newer, … Continue reading Racial disparities in antidepressant prescriptions
Emotional pain without context
Siddhartha Mukherjee provides a brief history of the serotonin hypothesis of depression, its demise and why dismissing serotonin may be an "overcorrection." Part of this story is an emerging theory of depression: A remarkable and novel theory for depression emerges from these studies. Perhaps some forms of depression occur when a stimulus — genetics, environment … Continue reading Emotional pain without context
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