Guess Who’s Promoting Insomnia

The always engaging MindHacks blog on the rise of insomnia awareness, treatment, and who’s promoting both. No big surprises here.
Discover Magazine has an exposé of a recent surge of news stories on insomnia and sleep disorders that stretch from the dull to the frankly unbelievable.
It turns out a fair number seem to be based on [...]

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Common Myths About the Brain

Three Common myths about the brain in a Scientific American article, one involving the common mistake, written about here previously, of confusing correlation and causality.

Myth: We only use 10 percent of our brainpower.
Myth: Some people are left-brained, others right-brained.
This myth has to do with alpha waves — see the following:

We can achieve a deeper sense [...]

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Willard Suitcase Exhibit Online

From the World of Psychology blog at PsychCentral is a link to a fascinating online museum of a psychiatric facility that closed down in 1995. Essentially they found the suitcases of hundreds of patients, picked a few, told their stories. It’s a fascinating window into the hows and whys of psychiatry in another era. [...]

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What Psychotherapy Is: Part 1

This is a difficult question to answer. Here’s a bare bones answer:
Psychotherapy is a conversation between two people — where one person predominantly talks and the other predominantly listens. The goal of the conversation that develops is to foster insight into the nature of the person doing most of the talking, as well as insight [...]

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The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations

That’s the title of a peer-reviewed study published this month by the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, courtesy of Ken Pope’s listserv. The study has an interesting finding — given bad information subjects were more likely to judge it credible if accompanied by irrelevant neuroscience information. This finding is particularly relevant to science reporting as neuroscience [...]

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Rx Consumption

Another one from the New York Times Book Review of Melody Peterson’s Our Daily Meds, on pharmaceutical spending and abuses, the usual litany. Here’s an excerpt:
Irate as she is that in a period (1980-2003) when Americans doubled what they spent on cars they increased their spending on prescription drugs by 17 times, Ms. Petersen [...]

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Functioning with Schizophrenia

The Yale Daily News ran a February 29 story on Elyn Saks whose recent memoir The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness. Time magazine voted it one of the top ten best non-fiction books of 2007. One of the interesting aspects of the story is Saks’ crediting of her psychoanalysis as being critical to [...]

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Spitzer or Lilly

From Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry: A Closer Look:
… I’d say the growing number of states suing Eli Lilly over its marketing of Zyprexa and its alleged coverup of the drug’s risks is more newsworthy than two adults having consensual sexual relations. Yes, Spitzer is a gold-medal winning hypocrite who damaged his family. His behavior was [...]

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Why Ken Pope Resigned From APA

Last month, Kenneth Pope, ethical maven, resigned from the American Psychological Association (APA). He resigned over concern regarding APAs torture policy. His Ethics in Therapy and Counseling (3rd edition) was published March 9.
The resignation is particularly notable as he has been a very active member of that organization, known as an expert on ethics, and [...]

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More on Zyprexa

Have just had the pleasure of chatting via email with Philip Dawdy of Furious Seasons. This is the guy who is single-handedly (well, there are some attorney generals involved too) giving Eli Lilly a major headache by posting some incriminating documents on his website. You can check out the documents here. Clicking on the link [...]

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