Last week, I chastised New Scientist for describing...
Category: mental health
Last week, I chastised New Scientist for describing a blog post from the National Institute of Mental Health as "a bombshell."
Andy Coughlan and Sara Reardon wrote the following lede off of the post, written by the NIMH director, Thomas Insel:
The world's biggest mental health research institute is abandoning the new version of psychiatry's "bible" – the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, questioning its validity and stating that "patients with mental...
Michelle Boorstein, a religion writer at The Washington Post, writes that following the...
Michelle Boorstein, a religion writer at The Washington Post, writes that following the suicide of the son of the megachurch pastor Rick Warren, "evangelical Christian leaders have begun a national conversation about how their beliefs might sometimes stigmatize those who struggle with mental illness."
Matthew Warren, who was 27, shot himself Friday, shocking even many close friends of his father's, who didn't know that his son "had long been suicidal," Boorstein writes.
Boorstein's story reports that evangelical leaders are calling "for an end to the shame and secrecy that still surrounds mental illness." The story portrays this as a welcome willingness to deal with an issue long...
On Sunday, Mark Roth of the Pittzburgh Post-Gazette launched an ambitious three-part series on schizophrenia, looking at its toll on...
On Sunday, Mark Roth of the Pittzburgh Post-Gazette launched an ambitious three-part series on schizophrenia, looking at its toll on individuals; the efforts to understand and treat the disease; and its connection to violent behavior.
The series is part of an even bigger project, a year-long effort to explore five brain disorders. In addition to schizophrenia, they are autism, depression, phobias, and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the disorder that is now increasingly being found in former football players. This is a stunning exercise in advance planning, and it apparently means that Roth can't take a day off until sometime in 2014. It might also mean that Roth's services will not be available for spot news coverage of mental illness or other medical stories. But that is the...
On his director's blog, Thomas R. Insel, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health, has listed what, in his view, were the top 10 advances in mental health and neuroscience in 2012. It's an interesting list not only because of what it includes, but because Insel shares...
On his director's blog, Thomas R. Insel, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health, has listed what, in his view, were the top 10 advances in mental health and neuroscience in 2012. It's an interesting list not only because of what it includes, but because Insel shares his interpretations and some brief ruminations on the findings, along with his suggestions of what is likely to continue to be important in the coming years.
Manipulating the epigenome to treat brain disorders is one intriguing development that I missed. I also liked his description of 2012 as "the year of genomic weirdness," which apparently is some sort of technical term. Under "weird," he includes the notion that "cancer might be a useful model for understanding autism or schizophrenia," that women can carry their offspring's cells in their brains, and that "microDNA segments could be transmitted independently of chromosomes...
Tim is a 27-year-old homeless man you might encounter on the streets of San Francisco. He's tall, gaunt, and unshaven, with wild curly hair. People who see him are afraid of him.
You might wonder where his family is. Why don't they take him in? Tim's father, Paul Gionfriddo, is a...
Tim is a 27-year-old homeless man you might encounter on the streets of San Francisco. He's tall, gaunt, and unshaven, with wild curly hair. People who see him are afraid of him.
You might wonder where his family is. Why don't they take him in? Tim's father, Paul Gionfriddo, is a former Connecticut state legislator who served as the legislature's expert on mental health. How is it possible that he cannot get treatment--and find a home--for his son?
In a moving article in Health Affairs, Gionfriddo blames the policies that he helped create:
..it’s the policies of my generation of policy makers that put that adorable toddler—now a troubled adult, six feet, five inches tall—on the street. And unless something changes, the policies of today’s generation of policy makers are what will keep him there...
Wit and cleverness are wonderful things, but sometimes it's best to just tell the story as it...
Wit and cleverness are wonderful things, but sometimes it's best to just tell the story as it is.
An Aug. 4 post by Andrea Walker for The Baltimore Sun begins this way:
Are people taking antidepressants when they don't need the drugs?
Are we becoming a nation who needs drugs to wipe away our sorrows?
A new study by Johns Hopkins researchers suggests we could at least be headed that way.
That's a clever start. And witty. But misleading. The study that Walker is reporting doesn't say where we're heading, whether people who don't need antidepressants are getting them, or what we...
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