Posted in FAQ about psychology, consumer interest, psychotherapy on July 18, 2008 | No Comments »
Many books have been written in hope of defining psychotherapy. Here’s a very short attempt (has appeared as part 1, part 2, on the ‘psychotherapy?’ page):
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 [...]
Posted in consumer interest, psychology in the media on June 27, 2008 | 2 Comments »
There’s a lot of marketing being done for ‘brain fitness’ devices and methods, and of course there’s big bucks to be made when your target market is baby boomers.
Interesting conversation going on between a few blogs on this topic. At Psych Central summing up a post at PsyBlog, asserts that the most evidence-based cognitive enhancer [...]
Posted in Big Pharma, consumer interest on June 11, 2008 | No Comments »
Dr. Carlat at it again. Here’s his take on Continuing Medical Education. It’s been said many times, but this is so to the point:
As I described last year in thei New York Times op-ed, much of the continuing medical education (CME) industry in the United States is a legalized money laundering operation. Rather than paying [...]
Posted in Big Pharma, bipolar disorder, blogging, consumer interest, depression, manic depression, psychology in the media, psychotropic drugs on May 7, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Two indicators: Research and practice. Well a new study seems to indicate that overdiagnosis is the order of the day. Furious Seasons has two stories on this topic, April 6 and 7, both quotes are straight from Furious Seasons.
Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry, advocating a Bipolar Overawareness Week, has an extensive treatment of the topic, with [...]
Posted in Big Pharma, consumer interest, diagnosis, medical model, psychotropic drugs on May 7, 2008 | No Comments »
No surprises here. The Diagnostic Statistical Manual (DSM) used to diagnose “mental illness” is linked to the psychopharm industry. From the New York Times, here:
More than half of the task force members who will oversee the next edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s most important diagnostic handbook have ties to the drug industry, reports a [...]
Posted in Big Pharma, consumer interest, psychology in the media, psychotropic drugs, public interest on May 1, 2008 | No Comments »
If this trend continues, it promises to be good news:
Drug and medical device companies should be banned from offering free food, gifts, travel and ghost-writing services to doctors, staff and students in all 129 of the nation’s medical colleges, an influential college association has concluded….
Drug companies spend billions of dollars wooing doctors — more than [...]
Posted in Big Pharma, consumer interest, persuasion, psychology in the media, psychotherapy on May 1, 2008 | No Comments »
Art of promotion. From PsychCentral, the discrepancy between promoting drugs and promoting good talk therapy:
This is a problem I’ve long noted — that every time a drug gets released or new research is published about it, the drug company makes sure you and everyone else knows about it. Through press releases, news brief, and numerous [...]
Posted in Big Pharma, consumer interest, psychology in the media, psychotropic drugs on April 24, 2008 | No Comments »
The St. Petersburg times has run a thorough and convincing article on the amount of fraud in promoting the use of atypical antipsychotics in the psychiatric community. Courtesy of Clinical Psychology… and Furious Seasons. Some important financial points:
Atypicals can cost up to 20 times as much as the old medications
This because the drugs are new, [...]
Posted in Big Pharma, compliance professionals, consumer interest, psychology in the media, research, science and psychology on April 23, 2008 | No Comments »
This past Friday Carlat had a great post listing a number of blows to unscrupulous marketing.
Editorial comment — Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA):
“The profession of medicine, in every aspect — clinical, education, and research — has been inundated with profound influence from the pharmaceutical and medical device industries. This has occurred because physicians have [...]
Posted in consumer interest, depression, psychology in the media, psychotropic drugs, public interest on April 21, 2008 | No Comments »
From a New York Times article about the impact of early use of antidepressants on identity:
“I’ve grown up on medication,” my patient Julie told me recently. “I don’t have a sense of who I really am without it.”
At 31, she had been on one antidepressant or another nearly continuously since she was 14…
But now she [...]
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