From over the weekend and Monday, some important articles:
- ***Think Twice: How the Gut’s “Second Brain” Influences Mood and Well-Being: Scientific American — A deeper understanding of this mass of neural tissue, filled with important neurotransmitters, is revealing that it does much more than merely handle digestion or inflict the occasional nervous pang. The little brain in our innards, in connection with the big one in our skulls, partly determines our mental state and plays key roles in certain diseases throughout the body.
This is a subject I often talk about on this blog. Gut health is often a foundation to all health. Here I talk about how it relates to mental health in my personal experience.
- ***What does Haiti need most? Spit. Bristle. Fury. — “The most urgent need … is not food and water which is temporary. The most urgent need is for psychiatrists.” — From an AP article in the Monterey Herald …Ah yes, food and water are temporary. Psychiatry is forever. Who can forget the great Thorazine famine of Ireland or the poor little Ethiopians with no Zyprexa in their bellies?
This in turn makes me think of the book Crazy Like Us. We are actively and aggressively exporting our impoverished views of the psyche to the world.
- ***Alaska psychiatrists accused of wrongly medicating children— Anchorage Daily News “An Alaska mental health advocacy group that has spent years battling the pharmaceutical industry over medication is suing more than a dozen Alaska child psychiatrists, saying the doctors unnecessarily drugged children and committed Medicaid fraud. The lawsuit, filed months ago in U.S. District Court in Alaska but only unsealed last month, is by the Law Project for Psychiatric Rights, led by Anchorage attorney Jim Gottstein. The organization filed as a whistleblower on behalf of the United States against the Alaska doctors and other defendants, including health service agencies, pharmacies, and state officials.”
- ***Opening Pandora’s Box: The 19 Worst Suggestions For DSM5 — Psychiatric Times — a thoughtful and fairly thorough piece. Rather surprising for a psychiatric rag. Though this one has quite a few pieces that tend to be more critical than the norm in psychiatry.