Today's Fresh Blogs...

• Cannabis & psychosis [Neurophilosophy]

  Published: July 27, 2007, 5:56 pm

  Tags: Psychiatry

  This week's issue of The Lancet contains the most comprehensive meta-analysis to date of the link between cannabis and psychosis: The evidence is consistent with the view that cannabis increases risk of psychotic outcomes independently of confounding and transient intoxication effects, although evidence for affective

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• Whether it's Britney or Lindsay, Let's Once Again Blame Mothers

  Published: July 28, 2007, 8:33 pm

  Tags: Cause, Psychiatry, Parenting, Psychology, Stereotypes, Asd, Aspergers, Autism, Britney Spears, Children, Dina Lohan, Education, Family, Lindsay Lohan, Mother Blame, Mothers, Parenting, Pdd Nos, Psychology, Sigmund Freud

  “Sometimes mothers can do no right” proclaims a July 29th New York Times article targeting Dina Lohan for the foibles, addictions, and recent arrest of her daughter, Lindsay Lohan. Mother blame? Nothing new if you’re the mother of an autistic child. Though widely discredited, the “refrigerator mother” theory of

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• Who is to blame for Tim Whattler's death?

  Published: July 29, 2007, 8:33 pm

  Tags: Psychiatry, Asperger S Syndrome, Asd, Aspergers, Autism, Children, Coroner, Depression, Education, Family, Parenting, Pdd Nos, Psychiatry, Suicide

  In February of 2006, 17-year-old Tim Whattler hung himself from a doorknob in his room in a psychatric unit Beech Court in Bridgwater, in England, just six hours after he had been admitted. Whattler had Asperger’s syndrome and had a history of difficulty with both educational and psychiatric placements; he had attempted suicide before and he

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• Who is to blame for our son’s death?

  Published: July 29, 2007, 8:05 pm

  Tags: Aspergers, Psychiatry, Suicide, Autism, Mental Health, Parents

  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/main.jhtml?xml=/health/2007/07/30/hasper130.xml&page=1 This story is so sad and so avoidable. My son is not so different from Tim Whattler. He is doing OK at the moment. But this was not always the case. We are not so different from Tim’s parents. We fought similar battles on our son’s behalf.

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• Is American Culture is Bad For Mental Health? [The Corpus Callosum]

  Published: August 3, 2007, 9:06 am

  Tags: Psychiatry

  I happened to run across a couple of articles pertaining to cultural influences on mental health.  Neither presented modern first-world culture in a positive light. The two articles are: Schizophrenia outcome measures in the wider international community; and A Longitudinal Study of the Use of Mental Health Services by Persons With Serious

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• del.icio.us vox links 4

  Published: August 3, 2007, 6:25 pm

  Tags: Psychiatry, Food Diet, Vaccines, Health, Weather, Neuroscience, Asd, Aspergers, Autism, Bugs, Children, Education, Family, Health, Measles, Mmr, Mosquitoes, Parenting, Pdd Nos, Summer, Sushi, Vaccines

  Near-Vegetative Man Partially Recovers from Brain Injury, Recites Pledge of Allegiance: Scientific American reports We never can know what is really going on in the brain of a non-verbal person with minimal or no motor skills. When Worry Hijacks The Brain - TIME on obsessive-compulsive disorder If you have a relative with OCD, you are 12%

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• Bipolar Restaurant [Omni Brain]

  Published: August 6, 2007, 9:00 am

  Tags: Psychiatry

  Joel of the Pax Nortana blog imagines dinner at a bipolar restaurant: You would be surrounded by frowning people. The food would be hospital food. If you did not eat it, they would not let you go home until you did. The food would make you constipated or dizzy or wanting more and more and more. You'd be obliged to drink large

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• More Convenient Bright Light Treatment for SAD [The Corpus Callosum]

  Published: August 10, 2007, 12:01 pm

  Tags: Psychiatry

  It is reasonably well established that treatment with bright light is effective for seasonal affective disorder (SAD).  The standard treatment is to have someone expose their face to 10,000 Lux of bright light every morning, for 30 minutes, preferably at the same time each day.  Early studies indicated that it is the intensity, not the

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• A Doctor on Junk Science and Autism

  Published: August 12, 2007, 4:06 pm

  Tags: Junk Science, Vaccines, Science, Treatment, Asd, Aspergers, Autism, Children, Education, Family, Health, Junk Science, Mercury, Myth, Mythology, Pdd Nos, Psychiatry, Science, Vacciens

  Rahul K. Parikh is a fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics and a pediatrician in Walnut Creek, California. Back in June, his op-ed, The Truth About Autism: Amid cries of an epidemic and parental fears that childhood vaccines may instead be poisoning their kids, doctors try to put a rapid increase in diagnoses of the learning disability in

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• Autism, MR, and Intelligence

  Published: August 21, 2007, 2:51 pm

  Tags: Psychiatry, Adulthood, Asd, Asperg, Aspergers, Autism, Bus, Clinic, Intelligence, Mental Retardation, Pdd Nos, Psychiatry

  A few days ago I wrote about how, when a different test for intelligence (Raven’s Progressive Matrices) was used to evaluate autistic children, they scored significantly higher, than when a more “traditional” test was used (the Wechsler). An interesting observation about intelligence and autism is made by psychiatrist Glen Elliot

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• Bad Science Abuses Autistics

  Published: August 30, 2007, 6:22 am

  Tags: Quackery In Autism, Badscience, Autism Rights, Research Ethics, Psychoanalysis, Autism, Psychiatry, Ethics

  If you have not read them already I urge you to visit Kristina Chew’s and Interverbal’s blogs where they write on an extraordinary technique employed by French psychiatrists to “treat” autism. And if anybody is fluent in French I would be interested to know what they are saying about it on Forum Autisme My own limited

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• LY2140023: Progress in Schizophrenia Treatment? [The Corpus Callosum]

  Published: September 4, 2007, 10:30 am

  Tags: Psychiatry

  from Seeman, Molecular Psychiatry (1998)3, 123-124] The discovery of this direct relationship was taken as strong evidence for the relationship between dopamine receptor blockade and therapeutic effect.  Some even went so far as to say that this proved that dopamine excess was the cause of schizophrenia, but that was a bit of a

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• More kids being diagnosed with bipolar disorder

  Published: September 4, 2007, 7:32 am

  Tags: Bipolar, Bipolar Disorder, Bipolardisorder, Depression, Doctors, Drugs, Health, Kids, Manic Depression, Manicdepression, Mood Swings, Moodswings, Parents, Psychiatry, Safety

  issue of Archives of General Psychiatry shows that between 1994 and 2003, the number of young people in the United States diagnosed with bipolar disorder has increased forty times.Are more kids really suffering from bipolar disorder, or is it possible doctors are over-diagnosing the illness? Dr. Mark Olfson, one of the authors of the report,

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• Diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder Rises in US Children

  Published: September 4, 2007, 1:43 pm

  Tags: Epidemic, Medicine, Psychiatry, Health, Adolescence, Asd, Aspergers, Autism, Bipolar, Children, Depression, Diagnosis, Drugs, Education, Family, Health, Medication, Parenting, Pdd Nos, Psychiatry, Teenagers

  which has shaken child psychiatry. Bipolar disorder is characterized by extreme mood swings. Until relatively recently, it was thought to emerge almost exclusively in adulthood. But in the 1990s, psychiatrists began looking more closely for symptoms in younger patients. Some experts say greater awareness, reflected in the increasing

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• "Intensive" Treatment Better for Bipolar Disorder [The Corpus Callosum]

  Published: September 8, 2007, 7:43 pm

  Tags: Psychiatry

  Controlled Trial Am J Psychiatry 164:1340-1347, September 2007 doi: 10.1176/appi.ajp.2007.07020311 2007 American Psychiatric Association Read the rest of this post... Read the comments on this

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