Treating The Prodrome
A prodrome is an early stage of a condition that might have different symptoms than the full-blown version. In psychiatry, the prodrome of schizophrenia is the few-months-to-few-years period when a...
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Anxiety Sampler Kits
The best thing about personalized medicine is that it’s obviously right. The worst thing is we mostly have no idea how to do it. We know that different people respond to different treatments. But...
View ArticleThe Chamber of Guf
[I briefly had a different piece up tonight discussing a conference, but the organizers asked me to hold off on writing about it until they’ve put up their own synopsis. It will be back up eventually;...
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Cognitive Enhancers: Mechanisms And Tradeoffs
[Epistemic status: so, so, so speculative. I do not necessarily endorse taking any of the substances mentioned in this post.] There’s been recent interest in “smart drugs” said to enhance learning and...
View ArticleSSRIs: An Update
Four years ago I examined the claim that SSRIs are little better than placebo. Since then, some of my thinking on this question has changed. First, we got Cipriani et al’s meta-analysis of...
View ArticleKetamine: An Update
In 2016, I wrote Ketamine Research In A New Light, which discussed the emerging consensus that, contra existing theory, ketamine’s rapid-acting antidepressant effects had nothing to do with NMDA at...
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Book Review: Evolutionary Psychopathology
I. Evolutionary psychology is famous for having lots of stories that make sense but are hard to test. Psychiatry is famous for having mountains of experimental data but no idea what’s going on. Maybe...
View ArticleDel Giudice On The Self-Starvation Cycle
[Content note: eating disorders] Anorexia has a cultural component. I’m usually reluctant to assume anything is cultural – every mediocre social scientist’s first instinct is always to come up with a...
View ArticleDiametrical Model Of Autism And Schizophrenia
One interesting thing I took from Evolutionary Psychopathology was a better understanding of the diametrical theory of the social brain. There’s been a lot of discussion over whether schizophrenia is...
View ArticlePsychiat-List Now Up
Lots of people have asked me to recommend them a psychiatrist or therapist. I’ve done a terrible job responding: it’s a conflict of interest to recommend my own group, and I don’t know many people...
View ArticleSurvey Results On SSRIs
SSRIs are the most widely used class of psychiatric medications, helpful for depression, anxiety, OCD, panic, PTSD, anger, and certain personality disorders (Why should the same drug treat all these...
View ArticleKetamine: Now By Prescription
Last week the FDA approved esketamine for treatment-resistant depression. Let’s review how the pharmaceutical industry works: a company discovers and patents a potentially exciting new drug. They spend...
View ArticleTranslating Predictive Coding Into Perceptual Control
Wired wrote a good article about Karl Friston, the neuroscientist whose works I’ve puzzled over here before. Raviv writes: Friston’s free energy principle says that all life…is driven by the same...
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Short Book Reviews April 2019
I. Method of Levels Timothy Carey’s Method Of Levels teaches a form of psychotherapy based on perceptual control theory. The Crackpot List is specific to physics. But if someone were to create one for...
View Article5-HTTLPR: A Pointed Review
In 1996, some researchers discovered that depressed people often had an unusual version of the serotonin transporter gene 5-HTTLPR. The study became a psychiatric sensation, getting thousands of...
View ArticleIs There A Case For Skepticism Of Psychedelic Therapy?
There’s been an explosion of interest in the use of psychedelics in psychiatry. Like everyone else, I hope this works out. But recent discussion has been so overwhelmingly positive that it’s worth...
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The APA Meeting: A Photo-Essay
The first thing you notice at the American Psychiatric Association meeting is its size. By conservative estimates, a quarter of the psychiatrists in the United States are packed into a single giant San...
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Do People Like Their Mental Health Care?
Along with more specific questions, I asked people who took the SSC survey to rate their experience with the mental health system on a 1 – 10 scale. About 5,000 people answered. On average, they rated...
View ArticleKnow Your Gabapentinoids
The gabapentinoids are a class of drugs vaguely resembling the neurotransmitter GABA. Although they were developed to imitate GABA’s action, later research discovered they acted on a different target,...
View ArticleAttempted Replication: Does Beef Jerky Cause Manic Episodes?
Last year, a study came out showing that beef jerky and other cured meats, could trigger mania in bipolar disorder (paper, popular article). It was a pretty big deal, getting coverage in the national...
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