Category: psychiatry

Researchers once optimistic about the development of new drugs for psychiatric illnesses say that research has failed and the drug pipeline has dried up.

In the Feb. 23 issue of Science News, Laura Sanders quotes one psychiatrist who says that "Not a single drug designed to treat a psychiatric illness in a novel way has reached patients in more than 30 years." A neuroscientist tells her that "“Brain research is really hard. No one should be blamed for how hard this is. But we did get stuck.”

She begins her thorough assessment of the state of psychiatric drug research with an anecdote about a Lilly drug, LY2140023, that promised relief from the hallucinations and delusions of schizophrenia. "All signs pointed to success," she writes. The drug worked well in mice, and in small, preliminary...

Sometimes the most obvious questions are the hardest ones to see. After thousands of studies on the pros and cons of using Ritalin and other stimulants for ADHD, Ilina Singh, a researcher at King's College London, spotted one such question: What can we learn from the children who take them? 

In a new study--the first to ask children taking ADHD drugs what they thought about the treatment--she found that many said medication helped them to manage their impulsivity and to make better decisions.

It's astonishing to me that nobody thought to ask this question before. And so it surprises me that the coverage was relatively sparse. The story received some attention in England, but almost none in the U.S. The study--the press release is here, and the link to the study is here--included American and British children...

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...

From Michael Specter, in the May 30th issue of The New Yorker:

In the early eighteen-seventies, a smallpox pandemic that accompanied the Franco-Prussian War killed more than half a million Europeans. Smallpox claimed the lives of tens of thousands of French soldiers, yet the Prussians lost fewer than five hundred men. That was because Prussia vaccinated its entire Army against the virus, and France did not. There has never been a more dramatic demonstration of a vaccine’s power to alter the course of history.

Specter uses his review of Pox: An American History, by the Brandeis historian Michael Willrich, as an opportunity to look at the complex ethics of mandating medical care. Smallpox has now been eliminated from the Earth, with the exception of samples held in vaults in the United States...

The Supreme Court is hearing arguments today on a California law that would restrict the sale of violent video games to minors. As Andrew Moseman reports in a clip round-up for the Discover aggregator blog 80beats, the case raises interesting first-amendment questions, and prompts reconsideration of the restrictions that already apply to minors--such as those regarding alcohol and tobacco.

I don't want to minimize the importance of the first-amendment issues; such things are critically...

How many stories do we have to read about overmedicated kids? And why on earth, if the New York Times felt the need to do yet another one, would it feature the thing so prominently?

I'm referring to Duff Wilson's "Child's Ordeal Shows Risk of Psychosis Drugs for Young" in today's paper.

I'll save you the trouble of reading this 2,000-word monster. Here's what it says: Some doctors are too quick to give drugs to kids who don't need them.

Is that front-page news? Some doctors are too quick to give drugs to 80-year-olds, too, or to middle-aged New York Times reporters who have sore joints because they just got divorced,...

The notion that drug-company sponsorship of a clinical trial might affect the outcome will come as no surprise to most Tracker readers. Numerous studies have shown that drug-company studies are more likely to show favorable results than are studies sponsored by the government.

Many of us, as a result, might have lapsed into a sort of reflexive view that drug-company-sponsored trials are always problematic. Dr. Daniel Carlat (left), a psychiatrist in private practice in Newburyport, Massachusetts, takes a more nuanced view in The Carlat Psychiatry Blog. He's a sharp critic of many drug-industry practices, but one who's willing to probe the details and correct himself when he's...