My IRB Nightmare
[Epistemic status: Pieced together from memory years after the event. I may have mis-remembered some things or gotten them in the wrong order. Aside from that – and the obvious jokes – this is all...
View ArticleToward A Predictive Theory Of Depression
[Epistemic status: Total wild speculation] I. The predictive processing model offers compelling accounts of autism and schizophrenia. But Surfing Uncertainty and related sources I’ve read are pretty...
View ArticleSSC Journal Club: Serotonin Receptors
Pop science likes to dub dopamine “the reward chemical” and serotonin “the happiness chemical”. God only knows what norepinephrine is, but I’m sure it’s cutesy. In real life, all of this is much more...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Against Rat Park
I. Rat Park is a famous study in which lab rats were kept in a really nice habitat that satisfied their every need. Contrary to the usual results with lab animals, scientists couldn’t get these happier...
View ArticleWhat To Make Of New Positive NSI-189 Results?
I. I wanted NSI-189 to be real so badly. Pharma companies used to love antidepressants. Millions of people are depressed. Millions of people who aren’t depressed think they are. Sell them all a pill...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Adderall Risks: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
[Previously in series: Antidepressant Pharmacogenomics: Much More Than You Wanted To Know; SSRIs: Much More Than You Wanted To Know, etc. This is all preliminary and you should not take it as a reason...
View ArticleBook Review: Madness And Civilization
[Content warning: Severe mistreatment of the mentally ill. Through this post, I’ll be following Foucault in using the politically incorrect term “madness” rather than the more modern “mental illness”,...
View ArticlePowerless Placebos
[All things that have been discussed here before, but some people wanted it all in a convenient place] The most important study on the placebo effect is Hróbjartsson and Gøtzsche’s Is The Placebo...
View ArticleClik here to view.
SSC Journal Club: Cipriani On Antidepressants
I. The big news in psychiatry this month is Cipriani et al’s Comparative efficacy and acceptability of 21 antidepressant drugs for the acute treatment of adults with major depressive disorder: a...
View ArticleGod Help Us, Let’s Try To Understand Friston On Free Energy
I’ve been trying to delve deeper into predictive processing theories of the brain, and I keep coming across Karl Friston’s work on “free energy”. At first I felt bad for not understanding this. Then I...
View ArticleClik here to view.
SSC Journal Club: Friston On Computational Mood
A few months ago, I wrote Toward A Predictive Theory Of Depression, which used the predictive coding model of brain function to speculate about mood disorders and emotions. Emotions might be a tendency...
View ArticleNavigating And/Or Avoiding The Inpatient Mental Health System
Apology and disclaimer This is in response to questions I get about how to interact (or not interact) with the inpatient mental health system and involuntary commitment. The table of contents is: 1....
View ArticleMental Health On A Budget
Everyone knows medical care in the US is expensive even with insurance and prohibitively expensive without it. I have a lot of patients who are uninsured, or who bounce on and off insurance, or who...
View ArticleShould Psychiatry Test For Lead More?
Dr. Matthew Dumont treated a 44 year old woman with depression, body dysmorphia, and psychosis. She failed to respond to most of the ordinary treatments, failed to respond to electroconvulsive therapy,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
In Search Of Missing US Suicides
[Content warning: suicide. Thanks to someone on Twitter I forget for alerting me to this question] Among US states, there’s a clear relationship between gun ownership rates and suicide rates, but not...
View ArticleHPPD And The Specter Of Permanent Side Effects
I recently worked with a man who took LSD once in college and never stopped hallucinating. It’s been ten years now and it’s still going. We can control it with medication, but take the meds away and it...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Melatonin: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
[I am not a sleep specialist. Please consult with one before making any drastic changes or trying to treat anything serious.] Van Geiklswijk et al describe supplemental melatonin as “a chronobiotic...
View ArticleDid A Melatonin Patent Inspire Current Dose Confusion?
Yesterday I wrote about melatonin, mentioning that most drugstore melatonin supplements were 10x or more the recommended dose. A commenter on Facebook pointed me to an interesting explanation of why....
View ArticleClik here to view.
SSC Survey Results: ADHD And Rejection Sensitivity
Introduction ADHD is typically considered a disorder of attention and focus. There are various other traits everyone knows are linked – officially, hyperactivity and “behavior problems”; unofficially,...
View ArticleThe Omnigenic Model As Metaphor For Life
The collective intellect is change-blind. Knowledge gained seems so natural that we forget what it was like not to have it. Piaget says children gain long-term memory at age 4 and don’t learn abstract...
View Article