Last week, I chastised New Scientist for describing...
Category: mental illness
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...
[Update: adds mention of Time magazine story.]
A team of researchers who analyzed genetic data on 33,000 people with mental illness and 28,000 controls discovered that the five most common mental illnesses--depression, autism, attention-deficit disorder, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder--share...
[Update: adds mention of Time magazine story.]
A team of researchers who analyzed genetic data on 33,000 people with mental illness and 28,000 controls discovered that the five most common mental illnesses--depression, autism, attention-deficit disorder, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder--share some of the same genetic abnormalities.
The finding, while it does not immediately lead to better treatment for any of these severe illnesses, does move researchers closer to understanding their causes. As Lauran Neergaard wrote for the AP:
"These disorders that we thought of as quite different may not have such sharp boundaries," said Dr. Jordan Smoller of Massachusetts General Hospital, one of the lead researchers for the international study appearing in The Lancet.
...
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...
Many people think there are no answers to the problem of violence and mental illness, including such journalist luminaries as Gwen Ifill of PBS Newshour. As I've noted here, that's not the case;...
Many people think there are no answers to the problem of violence and mental illness, including such journalist luminaries as Gwen Ifill of PBS Newshour. As I've noted here, that's not the case; her brief commentary on the issue was wrong.
Now David Brown of The Washington Post shows up with a story that makes my point. He reports that there is a lot known about the links between mental illness and violence, and that researchers have identified things--such as alcohol and drug abuse--that can increase the risk of violence in people who are mentally ill.
Spoiler: No, there is no screening test that will...
In November, I praised "a chilling story" by Peter Whoriskey in The Washington Post [that] shows how drug companies have misused their influence and their expertise to corrupt...
In November, I praised "a chilling story" by Peter Whoriskey in The Washington Post [that] shows how drug companies have misused their influence and their expertise to corrupt and distort research on new drugs." It was an important piece.
Now he is back with another pharmaceutical industry story, which leads with whether antidepressants should be prescribed to people suffering from grief such as that produced by the loss of a spouse. This time, I think Whoriskey has missed something important.
Both stories are part of a Post special report entitled "Can Medical Research Be Trusted?" These are important stories, and we need this kind of tough reporting on the powerful pharmaceutical industry. The stories detail suspicious practices by the pharmaceutical industry that have led to increased profits--sometimes at the...
It now appears that Washington will engage in a debate over gun control, and possibly go beyond a feckless "national conversation" and actually do something. Gun control is on the agenda: but beware who is controlling the agenda.
Much of the talk in the first two business days after the Newtown, CT...
It now appears that Washington will engage in a debate over gun control, and possibly go beyond a feckless "national conversation" and actually do something. Gun control is on the agenda: but beware who is controlling the agenda.
Much of the talk in the first two business days after the Newtown, CT shooting involves suggestions to restrict the use of guns by people with mental illness, as reported in Science Times by Richard A. Friedman, a professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College in Manhattan and a regular Times contributor.
It's hard to argue with that. Guns shouldn't be in the hands of crazy people who are likely to use them to commit murder. But there are two problems with this emerging "national conversation" about guns and mental illness.
First,...
Before we says anything about Newtown, a moment of silence.
As science reporters sit down at their desks on this very sad Monday morning (I'm sure I'm not the only one still in the emotional grip of this thing), we need to get to work. It's essential that we do not hand over this story to the...
Before we says anything about Newtown, a moment of silence.
As science reporters sit down at their desks on this very sad Monday morning (I'm sure I'm not the only one still in the emotional grip of this thing), we need to get to work. It's essential that we do not hand over this story to the political reporters, who will be interested in which party has leverage on gun control, how the NRA is mobilizing, what the prospects are for passage of a gun-control bill, and whether opponents of a bill will predicate their support on cuts in health care or entitlements or another unrelated issue. Political reporters are more likely than science reporters to repeat, without challenge, the myth and misinformation that will surely bubble from politicians' mouths.
There is plenty for science reporters to write about here. Why are the killers so often young adult men? What is it about schools that has led them to replace post offices as frequent scenes of mass...
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...
The authors of an article on the website of Scientific American Mind are entitled to their opinion on whether or not children can get bipolar disorder. They are not entitled to dress up their...
The authors of an article on the website of Scientific American Mind are entitled to their opinion on whether or not children can get bipolar disorder. They are not entitled to dress up their opinion as reporting.
The article, by Scott O. Lilienfeld and Hal Arkowitz, is headlined "Do Kids Get Bipolar Disorder?" That promises a broad examination of the topic. But that's not what we get.
The authors begin their story with a boy with behavior problems. But he's a fabrication. The story begins: "Imagine an eight-year old boy whom we will call Eric..." Imagination is a beautiful thing, but we should be wary of imagining characters in nonfiction. (Although it's a lot easier than finding real kids.)
They then recite statistics showing that the diagnosis of bipolar disorder in children has risen sharply in...
The new diagnostic manual being prepared...
The new diagnostic manual being prepared by the American Psychiatric Association, known as the DSM-5, has been the subject of enormous controversy. See this chronicle of the controversy from Psychology Today a couple of years ago, and this from The Huffington Post just a few weeks ago. A Google search will bury you in stories.
So the American Psychiatric Association, which is preparing the manual for publication in May, 2013, should be accustomed to criticism. And isn't that the...
The AP's Michael Biesecker did some good digging to come...
The AP's Michael Biesecker did some good digging to come up with horrible details on the treatment of mentally ill prisoners in North Carolina. But did the story undersell the reporting? In other words, was Biesecker's story as strong as it possibly could have been, or did he stumble?
Here's the lede, in a version of the story that appeared on www.newsobserver.com:
RALEIGH -- An internal review of conditions inside North Carolina's Central Prison found that inmates with serious mental illnesses were neglected by staff and locked away in fetid cells.
Had I not been tipped that this was a good...
Note: Corrects NPR to WBUR, an NPR member station--Paul Raeburn.
It's...
Note: Corrects NPR to WBUR, an NPR member station--Paul Raeburn.
It's called "skin shock" therapy. According to a story by Rachel Gotbaum on WBUR, it's a treatment in which small electrodes are attached to the skin to deliver electric shocks remotely to curb dangerous or unwanted behavior. (Thanks for Rachel Zimmerman of Commonhealth for the heads-up on the story.)
Critics have claimed that the therapy amounts to the torture of children. Numerous lawsuits have attempted to shut down the Judge Rotenberg Center in Canton, Mass., the only...
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In the wake of the Jan. 8 shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, I noted that some science and medical writers had succumbed to the temptation to let sources diagnose Jared Loughner based solely on the bald, smirking picture of Loughner that became the iconic image of the shooting.
Such diagnostic claims are not only...
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