- 2010 NAMI Convention to Address Youth Mental Health; Pediatricians Call for Routine Screening — WebWire — NAMI and Judith Warner, NYT journalist, pushing drugs on kids everywhere. What a nightmare. “The 2010 NAMI Convention also will honor journalist Judith Warner with an award for the book, We’ve Got Issues: Children and Parents in the Age of Medication (link to good review), which explores difficult decisions parents face in finding help for children who “suffer enormously” from mental illness.”
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- To heck with negative publicity! Doctors still dig those drug-company freebies | Booster Shots | Los Angeles Times — The public may have begun to raise a collective eyebrow at the largesse offered to doctors from drug makers and medical device manufacturers. Even the companies themselves have started to acknowledge the potential conflict of interest, or the perception of it. Medical schools too have begun to take a harder line on the matter. But individual doctors? They still kind of like this whole gift-giving, or rather, gift-getting practice.
- Computer program detects depression in bloggers’ texts — Science Daily — It’s bad enough having people tell us how we feel. Now we can look forward to machines doing it too. The software, developed by a team headed by Associate Professor Yair Neuman in BGU’s Department of Education, was used to scan more than 300,000 English language blogs that were posted to mental health Web sites. The program identified what it perceived to be the 100 “most depressed” and 100 “least depressed” bloggers. A panel of four clinical psychologists reviewed the samples, and concluded that there was a 78 percent correlation between the computer’s findings and the panel’s.
- GSK working to settle Paxil birth-defect suits — Fierce Pharma — The drugmaker has agreed to settle some 190 cases over allegations that the antidepressant caused birth defects, and an attorney involved in the litigation said another 100 or so claims have been settled as well. As Judge Sandra Mazer Moss, who’s coordinating the mass tort case, tells The Legal Intelligencer, GSK’s philosophy “is to try and settle what they can and to settle in groups.” — The settlement deals come on the heels of a loss in the only Paxil birth-defect case that has gone to trial in that Philadelphia mass tort. A jury awarded compensatory damages of $2.5 million to one plaintiff back in October. Every other case scheduled for trial since then has been settled, the Intelligencer reports. A GSK spokeswoman tells the publication that the company has agreed to settle some cases “despite its litigation defenses, in order to avoid the costs, burdens and uncertainties of ongoing litigation.”
- Heavy health burden: Fat but not my fault – Diet and nutrition- msnbc.com — Bigotry against the fat is wrong in any case. One never know what is up with folks and assumptions are often wrong. This made me think of various posts I’ve done on psychiatric drugs and fat. This is a good one to revisit. And another news item that also supports the post of mine I linked to is this.