In Own It: Make Your Anxiety Work For You, Caroline Foran aims to help you change your relationship with anxiety so that rather than trying to avoid it you can own it. The book isn’t preachy at all, and feels like a chat with a good friend. The author takes a no-bullshit tone, and assures […]
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This is a follow-up to a recent post on why I think direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs is wrong. This post is going to look specifically at marketing by drug companies aimed at health care professionals. Primarily this relationship between Big Pharma and psychiatry involves targeting physicians, as they’re doing the majority of the prescribing.
Big Pharma & Psychiatry: Cozier Than They Should Be? Read More »
In many countries, direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs is either prohibited or tightly restricted. The United States is a notable exception, along with New Zealand. What harms is this likely to cause? For tv ads, the standard pattern is to talk about the illness, talk about the amazing benefits of the drug, and then provide
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I recently watched the documentary Letters From Generation Rx, which looked at instances of people experiencing significant side effects while on psychiatric medication, including people who took the lives of either themselves or others while on psychiatric meds. One man featured in the film was a Canadian Member of Parliament (MP) whose teenage daughter had
Letters from Generation Rx—Weighing Medication Risks & Benefits Read More »
I have never had a problem with medications in general, and in my work as a nurse, I’ve seen how much good they can do. Despite that, I’ve gone off the meds I take for depression a few times, and that’s what this post is about. My first episode of depression was in 2007. I
My Experiences of (Temporarily) Going Off Psychiatric Medications Read More »
Ketamine is a relatively new option for managing treatment-resistant depression that has a different mechanism of action from other antidepressant medications. Ketamine itself isn’t new, though; it’s a dissociative anaesthetic that’s also known by its club drug name Special K. Over the last 10-15 years, multiple research trials have shown that it has an antidepressant
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In this post, I’ll take a look at some of the available guidelines for evidence-based treatment of anxiety disorders. While psychotherapies are extremely important in the management of anxiety disorders, this post will focus only on anti-anxiety medications. The treatment guidelines I refer to come from the British Association for Psychopharmacology and the World Federation
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I can’t think of any other type of health condition that has such polarized relationships with medications as mental illness. In some ways, to medicate or not to medicate has become a moral issue, with various involved parties taking a stance based on principle. Often, this stance is very broad, making sweeping generalizations. Public misconceptions
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In 2013 the International Society for Bipolar Disorders and the Canadian Network for Mood and Anxiety Treatments combed through the scientific literature and put together these guidelines for the pharmacological treatment of bipolar disorder. Treatments are classified as 1st, 2nd, or 3rd line based on the strength of existing evidence to support their effectiveness. The
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In Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions, Johann Hari takes a stand against the idea of biological causation of depression and anxiety. I expected going in that I would disagree with what Hari had to say, but it surpassed my expectations. To start off, let me tell you
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