Tag Archives: psychiatric

Dr. Peter Breggin, psychiatrist—”Join the Empathic Transformation”

As the recent New York Times story confirms, most psychiatrists don’t even do psychotherapy anymore; they simply diagnose and drug. As I first described in Toxic Psychiatry, medically-oriented mental health professionals have become remote from their patients whom they now seek to manipulate chemically rather than to know personally.

In the field we call mental health, the rampant diagnosing, drugging, and incarcerating of those we seek to help must be replaced by practices that encourage responsibility and freedom rather than compliance and docility. By working directly in the field of ethical human services and sciences, we can become a leading part in the grassroots movement we call the Empathic Transformation.

All over the world, those of us who practice the healing arts–physical, psychological and spiritual–are seeing the need to join together to further humanity’s empathic transformation–to transform the old ways into something better and even grander, into practices embedded in and imbued with empathy.

The world is changing and we need to lead the movement in our fields toward a view of human beings that never demeans and always empowers, that never forces but always encourages, and that recognizes that human beings are not ultimately driven by their instincts and their biochemical but by their ideals and principles.

Psychiatric News — Antidepressants/Antismoking Drugs Linked to Violent Behavior

A link between several types of psychotropic medications and violent behavior toward others has been documented in a recent study.

The medications most strongly linked to violent behavior were the smoking-cessation aid varenicline and antidepressants, regardless of class.In a study published in the December 15, 2010, PloS One, the researchers used 2004 to 2009 data from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Adverse Event Reporting System. They found that during the study period, 780,169 serious adverse events of one kind or another had been reported for 484 drugs, and that of those serious adverse events, 1,937 had been acts of violence. They defined a violent event as any case report containing one or more of the following items: homicide, physical assault, physical abuse, homicidal ideation, or violence-related symptom, but not more ambiguous descriptions such as crime, aggression, belligerence, or hostility.

EDITORIAL: Why are doctors writing so many prescriptions?

Grassley, a member of the Senate Finance Committee, wrote to state Medicaid agencies earlier this year, asking them to list their top 10 prescribers of eight drugs commonly used in psychiatry. It may be that these doctors have good reasons for writing the most prescriptions for these drugs, such as OxyContin and Xanax, but it might also point out instances of overuse or even fraud. In Florida, for example, one physician wrote 96,685 prescriptions for mental health drugs over a 21-month period. That works out to more than 150 prescriptions a day, seven days a week, for nearly two years.

The Irish Times—All in our heads: Have we taken psychiatry too far?

With drafts of the latest edition of the world’s leading psychiatry manual emerging, critics question the growing medicalisation of life’s problems. Over the past three decades, unhappiness has been redefined as depression, shyness has been reclassified as social anxiety disorder – even trivial complaints such as fussy eating are now being viewed through a psychiatric prism. Some of this is due to a single book, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual , which critics claim is contributing to the ever-expanding empire of mental health. The next official edition of the DSM will be published in May 2013, but draft versions are currently doing the rounds.