Psychiatry
Thinking Outside the Black Box on Antidepressants
By Rob Mitchum In 2004, the Food and Drug Administration placed their equivalent of a scarlet letter on the antidepressant fluoxetine. Acting on the compiled results of several clinical trials, the FDA affixed its foreboding “black box warning” on to the drug best known as Prozac, preaching caution about increased suicide risk in children and […]
Treating Pain on a Social Scale
By Matt Wood We hear a lot these days about online social networks, but the size and strength of a person’s real-life social network has major consequences for his or her health and quality of life. Studies have shown a statistical link between social interaction and mortality, and research has linked loneliness to a range […]
Finding Common Ground on Eating Disorders
By Matt Wood In the field of pediatric eating disorder studies, you might think that the one thing on which researchers could agree would be how to determine the appropriate body weight for a child. An exact determination of expected body weight for adolescents based on age, height and gender is critical for diagnosis and […]
Amping Up Effort
By Matt Wood Each day people make decisions about how much effort they’re willing to put into various tasks. The decision about how much effort to invest in an activity is influenced by the reward for doing something and the probability of actually getting it. You might be willing to work hard at your job […]
Breaking the Cycle of Violence
By Matt Wood More than 1.25 million children in the United States, or one in every 58, suffered some kind of neglect or physical, emotional or sexual abuse in 2005-2006. Such maltreatment interferes with normal development and can lead to a host of psychological disorders and behavioral problems as they become adults, particularly aggression. A […]
Breaking Ground on the Neuropsychiatric Data Mine
Biology used to be the scientific discipline where data was at a premium, a rare resource painstakingly collected in the field or the laboratory. But today’s biologists are confronted with a flood of data, a fire-hose torrent of genetic and clinical information that only builds with the spread of fast sequencing and electronic medical records. […]
A Gateway Activity? From Slot Machines to Speed
A visit to any casino will quickly demonstrate how vices clump together. At any hour of the day or night, many of the customers sitting intently in front of a slot machine will also be smoking cigarettes or drinking a cocktail. Sadly, addictions to these pursuits also tend to go hand in hand, with higher […]
Building a Better OCD Mouse
How do you know an animal model of a disease is really working? Researchers can create diseases such as cancer in a rat or mouse, but a tumor in a rodent may not behave the same way as a tumor in a human being. The challenge is even more difficult when scientists try to model […]
Rewriting the Book on the Brain
Students might sometimes think that their textbook appeared out of thin air, the accumulated knowledge of a field spontaneously forming into a heavy slab of facts and figures. But textbooks are like any other type of book, with flesh-and-blood authors who labor over the words within and make a million tiny decisions to shape the […]
Sexual Identity, Health, and Stigma in India
Last November, a barrier was broken in the prolific Bollywood film industry of India. A film called Dunno Y featured the first on-screen male-male kiss – a provocative scene in a country that only the year before repealed a law making homosexuality illegal. Many tagged the film as India’s version of Brokeback Mountain, a controversial […]
