04/13/21

Telling the Truth About Marijuana and Psychosis

In January of 2019 Alex Berenson’s book, Tell You Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness and Violence, was published. He hoped it would at least make his readers skeptical of the pro-marijuana arguments that advocates have peddled for the last twenty-five years. He said, “I hope it will open your eyes to the mental […]

04/21/20

Pros and Cons of Antipsychotics

Antipsychotic treatment is often associated with weight gain and metabolic syndrome, a cluster of symptoms that increases the risk of heart disease, stroke and diabetes, independent of other adverse effects like sexual dysfunction, drowsiness, dizziness, restlessness, and others. In The Lancet, Pillinger et al compared and ranked 18 antipsychotics on the basis of their metabolic […]

03/31/20

Cannabis and Psychosis: More Reality Than Satire

On December 19, 2014, in Cairns Australia Raina Thaiday stabbed eight children to death. She was related to all the children. “Seven of the kids were hers. The eighth was her niece.” On April 6, 2017, a Justice of the Supreme Court of Queensland heard testimony from Thaiday’s psychiatrists and later determined she couldn’t control […]

02/26/19

More Harm Than Good with Baclofen

In October of 2018 French health authorities approved the use of a muscle relaxant known as baclofen as a medication-assisted treatment (MAT) for alcoholism. In the U.S., it is approved to treat muscle spasms caused by conditions such as multiple sclerosis or spinal cord injuries.  But a French-American cardiologist names Olivier Ameisen self-treated his own […]

02/12/19

The Death of Melancholia, Part 1

Being depressed is experiencing five or more of nine diagnostic criteria within a two-week period of time. And despite other mood disorders like bipolar disorder, dysthymic disorder, cyclothymic disorder or depressive disorder NOS, (not otherwise specified), there is not a clear distinction between these kinds of depression. The older conceptualization suggested we had a problem […]

01/29/19

Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out

At the end of the Second World War in 1946 the Army wanted to show how new “experimental” treatments at the time, hypnosis and injections of sodium pentothal, were helping psychiatric casualties of war. These cases of “battle neurosis,” what we now call PTSD, were highlighted in a documentary called “Let There Be Light.” John […]

01/8/19

Antidepressant Fall From Grace, Part 2

In 1995 Irving Kirsch and Guy Sapirstein set out to assess the placebo effect in the treatment of depression. Like most people, Kirsch used to think that antidepressants worked—the active ingredient in the antidepressant helped people “cope with their psychological condition.”  They weren’t surprised to find a strong placebo effect in treating depression; that was […]

08/14/18

Electrical Psychiatry

Psychiatry has had a fascination with electricity-based treatments beyond the more well-known procedure of ECT (electroconvulsive therapy). Not only is there transcranial electrical stimulation (TES), there is also transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), deep brain stimulation (DBS), transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) and several other examples of electrical brain stimulation (EBS).  But there are multiple issues […]

01/5/18

In the Dark About Antidepressants

In 2011, antidepressants were the third most commonly prescribed medication class in the U.S. Mojtabai and Olfson noted in their 2011 article for the journal Health Affairs that much of the growth in the use of antidepressants was driven by a “substantial increase in antidepressant prescriptions by nonpsychiatric providers without an accompanying psychiatric diagnosis.” They […]

10/6/17

Is Ketamine Really Safe & Non-Toxic?

An article in The Morning Call, a newspaper for Allentown and the Lehigh Valley area of Pennsylvania, announced that a local company, the Lehigh Center for Clinical Research, would be conducting clinical trials for two pharmaceutical companies to gain FDA approval for modified versions of ketamine as a treatment for depression. The psychiatrist running the […]