I am the last person who should be difficult to convince that research is important.
I have spent a big hunk or life doing clinical trials of psychiatric drugs for FDA approval.
But I am also a great fan of real life. Of listening to patients, something that my patients often complain other psychiatrists don’t have time to do. Read more on Military Suicide…
Filed under depression, Family, Government, medicine, News by on Aug 2nd, 2018. Comment. 
She was 28, a bit overweight but tired and nervous at the same time.
“I’d like 15mg. of Celexa. My other psychiatrist wouldn’t give it to me, so I left him. He said it was either 10mg. or 20 mg. and that’s it.”
Not the usual “chief complaint” for why someone comes to a psychiatrist — but what the heck? Read more on How To Get 15 mg. of Celexa…
Filed under Diagnosis, Doctors, medicine, News, Psychiatrists by on Jul 31st, 2018. Comment.
“GABA” stands for “Gamma Amino Butyric Acid,” a neurotransmitter long known for its relaxing, anticonvulsant (meaning “anti-seizure”) activity. We have certainly found ways to increase its presence with drugs that operate on, well, “lateral pathways” to increase its presence quantitatively. Unfortunately, these usually involve addictive substances, like benzodiazepines, which are pretty heavily addictive for most folks.
I am really glad those loveable Brits at U. Cambridge are saying they help “repress” unwanted thoughts. This is to me, a direct validation of Freudian Thought. We “repress” thoughts, and this seems to be linked to the way we do so. Read more on The Function Of GABA…
Filed under Alternative Medicine, medicine, Mental Illness, News, Research by on Jun 13th, 2018. Comment.
The easy part is the FDA congratulating itself for an initial effort in 2004 to diminish the use of antidepressants in children and adolescents by adding the black-box warning that such medication may increase suicidal ideation.
Equally easy is blaming physicians who treat children and adolescents for becoming “inured” to warnings. Read more on More Kids On Antidepressants…
Filed under depression, medicine, News, Psychiatrists by on May 18th, 2018. Comment.
One of the several wonderful things about my husband (there are far too many to enumerated here) is that every morning when I wake he asks me if I have slept well and feel rested.
I grew up in a household where my parents thought it was normal to fall asleep in front of the TV, wake up, and decide to “finish the night off” in bed. They slept late on the weekends.
I think they were both chronically sleep-deprived for all of their adult lives. Read more on Sleep…
Filed under News, Sleep by on Jan 3rd, 2018. Comment.
I remember my respected psychopharmacology preceptor always had a pile of a bit out of date copies of the Wall Street Journal sitting around the house. I asked him why — about the third time I saw them sitting around his living room. He explained to me then it was the thing you really had to read to know what was going on in the pharmaceutical industry.
I remember I rolled my eyes heaven ward. I was too busy memorizing molecular structures and trying to understand potential mechanisms of drug-drug interactions. I still do a bunch of that sort of thing. I do it more quickly than I did at that time, but I still do it. Oh, I will find on line pretty much anything I can in “Newsfeeds” and such, but it is more to condemn than to follow these days, from what I know and can see. Basically, my problem is that they seem to keep making better sounding drugs. But from what I read, I don’t usually see them as a clear CLINICAL improvement over what I have seen in the past. In other words, I don’t think they are making people “more better” in terms of having more efficacy or less side effects or such. I just can’t find it in statistics in general, and sometimes even wonder if statistics are not a tad “Gerrymandered.”
Filed under FDA, News, prescription drugs by on Aug 25th, 2017. Comment.
While I was training in psychiatry 30 years ago, the field was changing around me. The older psychoanalysts were forced — reluctantly — to add prescription of psychotropics to their practices or else patients would never make it to their door. Of course, they had little to no training in pharmacology and less interest so they didn’t usually know what they were doing. While I was ascending in the ranks of psychiatric trainees, the best and the brightest of us were ushered into special training in pharmacology research. I was (and probably still am) about as idealist and apolitical an up-and-coming psychiatrist that anyone could have invented. Read more on The Politics of Drug Development…
Filed under politics, prescription drugs, Psychiatrists, Uncategorized by on May 20th, 2017. Comment.
I have been worrying about patients taking them, literally, for years and years. I remember one of those studies that they release to the media. It happened shortly after we moved to the San Diego area about 2004 when I heard on the radio that people who used prescription sleeping pills just did not live as long as people who did not. Read more on Sleeping Pills Are Not The Best Things For Sleep…
Filed under prescription drugs, Psychiatrists by on May 11th, 2017. Comment.
I have never told anyone to stop seeing a homeopath who was helpful to them. I decide on the basis of safety and efficacy for every treatment, as best I can. Even if I sometimes have wondered about efficacy, I will admit. But for safety, homeopathy is off the charts. I know of no down-side. I remember looking at the “dilution” level of the remedies. In general, they are so dilute that they could not possibly have any of the “substance” that was used to make them, not even a molecule.
Filed under Alternative Medicine, Diagnosis, Doctors, FDA, medicine, News, Research by on Jan 1st, 2017. Comment.
David Hardy passed away last week after suffering a stroke. You may not have heard of him, but you may be one of the many thousands of people who have been helped by the products of his research, EmPowerPlus and Daily Essential Nutrients (DEN). These pioneering products have been instrumental in the treatment of mental health problems with multiple micronutrients (minerals and vitamins) for the past two decades. Independent clinical research on these products has been led by Bonnie J. Kaplan, PhD, Professor Emeritus, Cumming School of Medicine, The Child Development Centre at the University of Calgary (Alberta, Canada) for over ten years. This research — which is not paid for by the manufacturers and hasn’t had a government grant for many years — has been conducted in Canada, the US and New Zealand. 
Read more on Natural Mental Health Treatment Pioneer Memorial…
Filed under Alternative Medicine by on Nov 19th, 2016. Comment.