Abuse of Xanax Leads Clinic to Halt Supply

October 5th, 2011

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Gayle Mink, a nurse practitioner at a community mental health center here, had tired of the constant stream of patients seeking Xanax, an anti-anxiety drug coveted for its swift calming effect.

Because of the clamor for the drug, and concern over the striking number of overdoses involving Xanax here and across the country, Seven Counties took an unusual step — its doctors stopped writing new prescriptions for Xanax and its generic version, alprazolam, in April and plan to wean patients off it completely by year’s end.

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Talk Therapy Lifts Severe Schizophrenics

October 5th, 2011

People with severe schizophrenia who have been isolated, withdrawn and considered beyond help can learn to become more active, social and employable by engaging in a type of talk therapy that was invented to treat depression, scientists reported on Monday. Read the rest of this entry »

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Psychotherapy Eases Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Study Finds

February 19th, 2011

A new study suggests that psychotherapy and a gradual increase in exercise can significantly benefit patients with chronic fatigue syndrome.

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A FIGHTING SPIRIT WON’T SAVE YOUR LIFE

January 30th, 2011

GABRIELLE GIFFORDS’S remarkable recovery from a bullet to her head has provided a heartening respite from a national calamity. Representative Giffords’s husband describes her as a “fighter,” and no doubt she is one. Whether her recovery has anything to do with a fighting spirit, however, is another matter entirely.

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CHILDREN AND SSI MOTIVATION TO MEDICATE

December 12th, 2010

Geneva Fielding, a single mother since age 16, has struggled to raise her three energetic boys in the housing projects of Roxbury. Nothing has come easily, least of all money.

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Infants of Depressed Mothers Living in Poverty

October 2nd, 2010

Depression in parents poses serious risks to millions of children
in the United States each day, yet very often goes
undetected and untreated. The risk can be very great for
babies and toddlers, who are completely dependent on their parents
for nurturing, stimulation, and care—and for poor families that do
not have the resources to cope with depression. But depression is
treatable and opportunities to reach these families and connect
them to help already exist within multiple systems.

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Child’s Ordeal Shows Risks of Psychosis Drugs for Young

September 2nd, 2010

OPELOUSAS, La. — At 18 months, Kyle Warren started taking a daily antipsychotic drug on the orders of a pediatrician trying to quell the boy’s severe temper tantrums.

Thus began a troubled toddler’s journey from one doctor to another, from one diagnosis to another, involving even more drugs. Autism, bipolar disorder, hyperactivity, insomnia, oppositional defiant disorder. The boy’s daily pill regimen multiplied: the antipsychotic Risperdal, the antidepressant Prozac, two sleeping medicines and one for attention-deficit disorder. All by the time he was 3.

He was sedated, drooling and overweight from the side effects of the antipsychotic medicine. Although his mother, Brandy Warren, had been at her “wit’s end” when she resorted to the drug treatment, she began to worry about Kyle’s altered personality. “All I had was a medicated little boy,” Ms. Warren said. “I didn’t have my son. It’s like, you’d look into his eyes and you would just see just blankness.”

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Palliative Care Extends Life, Study Finds

August 28th, 2010

In a study that sheds new light on the effects of end-of-life care, doctors have found that patients with terminal lung cancer who began receiving palliative care immediately upon diagnosis not only were happier, more mobile and in less pain as the end neared — but they also lived nearly three months longer. In a study that sheds new light on the effects of end-of-life care, doctors have found that patients with terminal lung cancer who began receiving palliative care immediately upon diagnosis not only were happier, more mobile and in less pain as the end neared — but they also lived nearly three months longer. In a study that sheds new light on the effects of end-of-life care, doctors have found that patients with terminal lung cancer who began receiving palliative care immediately upon diagnosis not only were happier, more mobile and in less pain as the end neared — but they also lived nearly three months longer.

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What Is There About 20-Somethings?

August 26th, 2010

This question pops up everywhere, underlying concerns about “failure to launch” and “boomerang kids.” Two new sitcoms feature grown children moving back in with their parents — “$#*! My Dad Says,” starring William Shatner as a divorced curmudgeon whose 20-something son can’t make it on his own as a blogger, and “Big Lake,” in which a financial whiz kid loses his Wall Street job and moves back home to rural Pennsylvania. A cover of The New Yorker last spring picked up on the zeitgeist: a young man hangs up his new Ph.D. in his boyhood bedroom, the cardboard box at his feet signaling his plans to move back home now that he’s officially overqualified for a job. In the doorway stand his parents, their expressions a mix of resignation, worry, annoyance and perplexity: how exactly did this happen?

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The Rise of the Psychopharmaceutical Industry 1987-2010

August 1st, 2010

Robert Whitaker’s brilliant book Anatomy of an Epidemic asks a simple question.Why , if psychiatric drug treatments are so efficacious, has the number of people on disability for mental illness more than tripled in the last 25 years? Most doctors and researchers answered this question by stating that the numbers have increased simply because we are diagnosing more people with mental illness. In response to this stereotyped dismissal of his data, Robert began to do more research on the efficacy of known psychiatric treatments. And then, while poring through the psychiatric scientific literature on treatment effectiveness for the last fifty years he found an even darker question beginning to emerge. “Is it possible that psychiatric drugs are actually making people much worse?” Could it be that far from “fixing broken brains” the drugs being offered actually are worsening, and even causing, the very illnesses they claim to heal?   …

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