Skip to main content

Thomas Insel - Toward a New Understanding of Mental Illness




Cutting this guy's budget is like telling Orville and Wilbur Wright to take the month off.
Labels:

Comments

  1. Muneer HussianJune 27, 2013 at 5:29 AM

    This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

Loony Saints - Margaret of Cortona Edition

Every once in a while, Prozac Monologues reaches into my Roman Catholic childhood's fascination with saints, especially the ones who today might be assigned a diagnostic code in the DSM.  Twice, Lent Madness has introduced me to new ones that I share with you.



A few years ago it was Christina the Astonishing.










Today it's Margaret of Cortona.  If you're a Lent Madness regular, you'd expect Margaret to be a shoe in for the first round of voting, where her competition is a stuffy old bishop/theologian, because Margaret became a Franciscan and, more significantly, her story features a dog.  Lent Madness voters are suckers for dogs.

Post a Comment
Read more

Giving thanks for Jerod Poore

Jerod Poore is the walking, talking, tweeting, posting wikipedia of all meds psychiatric and neurological. His manifesto: At Crazymeds[his original website] we make psychiatric and neurological conditions (AKA brain cooties) our bitches with evidence-based medicine and a healthy dose of gallows humor.

When I caught brain cooties fourteen years ago, Jerod was the first person I found who gave me genuine information. When the docs turned my brain into a chemistry experiment, Jerod told me what was happening to it.


That's the sketch I drew of my brain on drugs. Not the drugs they warn you about, but the drugs they scold you for refusing to take. Prozac, Celexa, Remeron, Cymbalta, Effexor.

Now, these are fine medications and do help people, notwithstanding the fact that they did not help me. It took years to figure out that my diagnosis was wrong, so these were the wrong medications for me anyway. If they help you, TAKE THEM.

But my mind was mush. The docs gave me precious little inf…
Post a Comment
Read more

Antipsychotics and Loss of Brain Matter

What are antipsychotics doing in your brain besides preventing psychosis? This is a report on a study conducted from 1991 to 2009 that looked at that question.

Here is the context:

Progressive brain volume changes in schizophrenia are thought to be due principally to the disease. However, recent animal studies indicate that antipsychotics... may also contribute to brain tissue volume decrement. Because antipsychotics are prescribed for long periods for schizophrenia patients and have increasingly widespread use in other psychiatric disorders, it is imperative to determine their long-term effects on the human brain.

Before I get to what the study revealed, here is the investigator, National Medalist of Science winner, Nancy Andreasen.



 Note: The interview was recorded twenty-five+ years after the study began and reflects a development in the questions pursued.

Objective of the study:

To evaluate relative contributions of 4 potential predictors (illness duration, antipsychotic treatment, ill…
Post a Comment
Read more