by the mid-1990s the serotonin-deficiency theory of depression had been scientifically tested and rejected

Wow, I wake up this morning and, after walking the dog, making coffee, checking for email from the boss man, find this Rockin piece at Furious Seasons.

Finally reality is coming home to roost. SSRI's, SNRI's don't correct imbalances in your brain...but that's really the tip of the iceberg and I hope this one keeps melting.

By the way, one of many problems with psychiatrists is that psychiatry really is the easiest specialty in medicine, where the med students with the lowest grades and the weakest test scores end up. Oh and the ones that got caught working while impaired (that's high on drugs folks) back when they were real doctors.

And there's a good New York Times piece that adds more to the idea that thyroid problems may cause psychiatric symptoms.

It still concerns me that some phrinks will label someone with an abnormal thyroid as bipolar , depressed, or who knows what, and treat the abnormal thyroid levels as symptom of the purported mental illness, while some will say that the bipolar diagnosis or other psychiatric diagnosis was given incorrectly to someone who needed thyroid medicine.

Things I was wrong about

1. It's not only the good that die young - if you disagree, just wait, you'll change your mind in a few years;

2. All of the people who voted for W really do have organic brain damage, they just do;

3. Taco Salad is not a health or diet food;

4. Cats....

this list is by no means intended to be exhaustive

It's No Secret

Welcome to the 21 century where nothing is private. Your health information, not really a big secret - why have you got something to hide?

The Last Psychiatrist has an excellent piece on google and privacy and these folks, Patient Privacy Rights, are trying to do something to improve the situation.

I've thought about providing my health care providers with this form, but I'm a little chicken, I mean what if it goes in my permanent record and I get bad health care because of it. Still the form is pretty cool.

Thoughts, Questions, Concerns?

Ain't that America?

I got this first story, the story of immigrants being forcibly drugged from the ever charming Liz Spikol, and the second one from the good old New York Times. It just makes you think, at least they didn't forcibly drug the firefighters who came in from Mexico to help put out the California fires, well, I don't think they did.

Lack of Insight

Anti-science fear mongers like the Treatment Advocacy Center advocate forced medication and confinement of people labeled as having mental illnesses based on the claim that people so labeled lack insight, however, this argument is specious for numerous reasons one of which is the notorious lack of insight of clinicians who assign psychiatric labels to humans:

"Clinicians, even well-trained ones, often have excess confidence in their own perceptions, are sometimes influenced by biases and agendas that they themselves do not fully appreciate, and are frequently resistant to the base rates of dangerousness for the populations they are evaluating."

Profiles, Probabilities, and Stereotypes by Frederick Schauer

Crazy Love

We just keep going and and it keeps getting better.

It's a battlezone out there in blogland

Still it's worth it. Gianna at Bipolar Blast has the Martin Luther King, Jr. quote that keeps so many of us going in these interesting times.