Practically-A-Book Review: Dying To Be Free
I am the last person with a right to complain about Internet articles being too long. But if I did have that right, I think I would exercise it on Dying To Be Free, the Huffington Post’s 20,000-word...
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The Efficacy Of Everything In Psychiatry In One Graph Plus Several Pages Of...
Shamelessly stolen from my hospital’s Journal Club: Huhn et al (2014) graph the Efficacy Of Pharmacotherapy And Psychotherapy For Adult Psychiatric Disorders, and it looks like this: Before anything...
View ArticleMoney, Money, Everywhere, But Not A Cent To Spend
The DSM is written mostly by academics, which is why it gets so excited about distinctions like schizoid personality versus schizotypal personality. If it were written by clinicians, it might better...
View ArticlePharma Virumque
Going around the psychiatry blogosphere recently: this segment by John Oliver about doctors who take pharmaceutical company money: I will resist the urge to geek out about its minor medical errors1 in...
View ArticleEarly Intervention: You *Might* Get What You Pay For
I find myself caught between the genetics community – which takes it as a given that childhood experiences and education have a very limited role in shaping life outcomes – and the psychiatric...
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Highlights From My Notes From Another Psychiatry Conference
I took a break from my busy schedule of learning all the reasons you shouldn’t eat bats to attend another local Psychiatry Conference. This conference consisted of a series of talks about all the most...
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Chemical Imbalance
[content note: mental illness. I am still in training and do not understand these issues even as well as a fully-trained psychiatrist, let alone a researcher, so take all the biology and studies in...
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Polemical Imbalance
Today is an exciting day for me. I got argued against on Mad In America. This one is going straight to my resume. Mad In America apparently doesn’t like being called an anti-psychiatry blog, so let’s...
View ArticleNefarious Nefazodone And Flashy Rare Side Effects
[Epistemic status: I am still in training. I am not an expert on drugs. This is poorly-informed speculation about drugs and it should not be taken seriously without further research. Nothing in this...
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Prescriptions, Paradoxes, and Perversities
[WARNING: I am not a pharmacologist. I am not a researcher. I am not a statistician. This is not medical advice. This is really weird and you should not take it too seriously until it has been...
View ArticleReflections From The Halfway Point
I. A while back one of my patients was having a foot problem, so I consulted the hospital podiatrist. He met me in my workroom, and I explained exactly what I needed from him, but over the course of...
View ArticleThe Case Of The Famous Physicist
I. Old news, but I only just heard about it: Long Island woman says psych ward doctors believed she was delusional for insisting Obama follows her on Twitter. The story: a woman was brought in for...
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Things That Sometimes Work If You Have Anxiety
Anxiety disorders are the most common class of psychiatric disorders. Their US prevalence is about 20%. They’re also among the least recognized and least treated. We have sort of finally beaten into...
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CBT In The Water Supply
[Epistemic status: Very speculative, <50% confidence, thinking out loud. Don't let this turn you off therapy.] Here’s a vignette from cognitive-behavioral therapy book When Panic Attacks, heavily...
View ArticleReverse Psychology
[Content warning: suicide] I. It all started when I made that phone call. I was really bad. All the tenure-track positions I’d applied to had politely declined, and I saw my future in academia...
View ArticleMagic Markers
[Thanks to some people on Rationalist Tumblr, especially prophecyformula, for help and suggestions.] There’s an old philosophers’ saying – trust those who seek the truth, distrust those who say they’ve...
View ArticleContra Caplan on Mental Illness
I. Bryan Caplan has a 2006 paper arguing that economic theory casts doubt on the consensus view of psychiatric disease. He writes: Economists recognize the benefits of specialization. Only with...
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Against Against Autism Cures
[Content warning: autism, disability, psychiatry, abuse] I. Vox: We’ve called autism a disease for decades. We were wrong. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I know and like many people...
View ArticleSchizophrenia: No Smoking Gun
[Note: despite how some people are spinning this, tobacco is still really really bad and you should not smoke it] I. Schizophrenics smoke. A lot. Depending on the study, about 60-80% of schizophrenics...
View ArticleTwo Attitudes In Psychiatry
Attitude 1 says that patients know what they want but not necessarily how to get it, and psychiatrists are there to advise them. So a patient might say “I want to stop being depressed”, and their...
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