How Everyone Became Depressed

The new drugs, on the whole, have been a blessing, and it is unnerving to see the whole psychopharmacological enterprise now trashed in an indiscriminate manner.

Better care for vets with PTSD, suicide prevention, getting the mentally ill out of prison: What enlightened person could possibly oppose any of these ideas?

What is changing in peoples lives to accelerate all this focused and unfocused anxiety?

There’s a “crisis” in the vast new interest in porn, now that sexual images can be streamed on smartphones.

Peter Kramer's book, Ordinarily Well: The Case for Antidepressants, is fluently written, interestingly argued, and deserves wide attention.

Today, the chatter on personal devices is about depression, sometimes about suicidal thoughts. Young girls in particular are batting this stuff about on Facebook, and acting on it.

Before psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy, there was a third therapeutic tradition in psychiatry--and it involved heat. And it was very successful.

Our hearts go out to this sad, young man who is experiencing the symptoms of severe depression. He has somehow fallen between the cracks in the system of psychiatric care.

The newest suicide rates are just out and the results suggest that an epidemic of suicide among the nation’s young teenage girls is in course.

Health

Is the Countryside Now More Toxic Than the City?

Edward Shorter Ph.D. on April 21, 2016

By almost every measure of mental health, the countryside is now more dangerous than the city.

By almost every measure of mental health, the countryside is now more dangerous than the city.

We have long known that antidepressants are not highly effective because they fail so many of their licensing trials for the Food and Drug Administration.

Depression

Does City Life Make Us Crazy?

Edward Shorter Ph.D. on March 22, 2016

Ever since the French poet of dissolution, Charles Baudelaire, described “the chaos of the living city” in 1857, the city has been associated with mental fragmentation and madness.

Ever since the French poet of dissolution, Charles Baudelaire, described “the chaos of the living city” in 1857, the city has been associated with mental fragmentation and madness.

They are a familiar sight in any psychiatrist’s office, patients who are deeply sad without being able to say why. They may even have started asking, “What’s the point?”

Estimating Spitzer’s place in history is largely a matter of assessing the impact of the DSM-3, and the revised version, DSM-3-R.

It happens all the time: symptoms without lesions. You feel awful, have pains here and there, but physicians can’t find anything organically wrong with you.

A psychiatric patient who throws a tray table has committed a criminal offense and may be the object of “lethal force.” Any concept that the symptoms of psychiatric patients may involve aggression and agitation – and should be the object of medical not police attention -- has been lost here.

Depression

What To Do for Those Truly Depressed Kids?

Edward Shorter Ph.D. on November 18, 2015

Psychiatry, as a field, has forgotten so much. But it’s the kids who are now paying a price for this.

Psychiatry, as a field, has forgotten so much. But it’s the kids who are now paying a price for this.

At NIMH, Insel brought in a big new program, Research Domain Criteria (RDoC), to investigate the biological underpinnings of psychiatric illness.

Depression

Kitty Dukakis’s Chronic Depression

Edward Shorter Ph.D. on September 5, 2015

It is wonderful to see science and reason triumphing over urban myths -- comparable to the anti-vaccine myths – that are toxic to public health. And it’s happening because of the engagement of non-physician volunteers such as the Dukakis’s and the Lutz’s.

It is wonderful to see science and reason triumphing over urban myths -- comparable to the anti-vaccine myths – that are toxic to public health. And it’s happening because of the engagement of non-physician volunteers such as the Dukakis’s and the Lutz’s.

The tragedy here is that, among that many symptoms of autism that are unresponsive to treatment, catatonic symptoms are highly responsive. Instead, many clinicians are still administering neuroleptics, which may make the patients worse rather than better. Medicine has the power to relieve illness, but switch a train onto the wrong track and it may just ignore the red flag