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Patients who believe in God may experience better short-term treatment outcomes for psychiatric illness, according to a new study. Individuals who described themselves as having strong faith reported having a better overall response to treatment, said David Rosmarin, a clinician and instructor in the department of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School in Boston. "We found that patients who had higher levels of belief in God had better treatment outcomes — better well-being, less depression and less anxiety," Rosmarin told LiveScience.

Although fewer than 6 percent of American adults will have a severe mental illness in a given year, according to a 2005 study, many more—more than a quarter each year—will have some diagnosable mental disorder. That’s a lot of people. Almost 50 percent of Americans (46.4 percent to be exact) will have a diagnosable mental illness in their lifetimes, based on the previous edition, the DSM-IV. And the new manual will likely make it even "easier" to get a diagnosis. If we think of having a diagnosable mental illness as being under a tent, the tent seems pretty big. Huge,...

UPDATE (AP) — A hearing on whether a reporter should be ordered to testify about how she obtained confidential information in the Colorado theater shooting case is being continued until next week. New York-based Fox News reporter Jana Winter cited anonymous law enforcement officials in reporting that suspect James Holmes had sent a psychiatrist a notebook of drawings that foreshadowed the July 20 attack. Prosecutors and Holmes’ lawyers argued about the issue in court Monday, but the defense wants to again question a detective about whether he might have told someone else about the notebook, who may have then talked...

With the Christopher Dorner case, the role of prescription psychotropic drugs in mass killings has again come to the forefront. Numerous articles have approached the role of so-called "psych meds" in causing depraved and indifferent violent behavior, but one in particular deserves attention because it highlights the fact that among psychiatric professionals there is no coherent understanding of what needs to be done after we take people off of drugs that are prescribed for their psychiatric illnesses. The article -- Jon Rappoport's "Is Christopher Dorner Another Psychiatric Killer?" -- makes a number of important points about the former Los Angeles...

THE grieving process is in danger of being branded a medical condition if a mourner feels sad for more than two weeks and consults a GP, according to an international authority on death and dying. At present, mourners can feel sad for two months before being told they have a mental disorder, says Professor Dale Larson. Decades ago, a diagnosis could be made after a year.In a keynote address at an Australian Psychological Society conference in Melbourne on Saturday, Prof Larson will express his anger about the American Psychiatric Association's new diagnostic manual, DSM 5, which is used in many...

Recent and accelerating changes in AmericaÂ’s social and political landscape have me pondering my chosen profession these days. IÂ’m not talking about the rumored craziness of the upcoming new DSM-V, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Fifth Edition. Shrinks must struggle to come to grips with each one of these committee-generated monstrosities as they appear, even though their actual usefulness in practice grows increasingly suspect. Neither am I talking about the new, Byzantine complexities of the CPT billing codes that have come down on us like a plague of locusts as ObamaCare begins to work its transformational magic. I am also...

”It was never a medical decision — and that’s why I think the action came so fast… It was a political move.” “That’s how far we’ve come in ten years. Now we even have the American Psychiatric Association running scared.” — Barbara Gittings, Pro-homosexual Activist Introduction Homosexuality advocates like to appeal to position statements published by American mental health organizations to fortify their bogus claims concerning homosexuality issues. One would expect such professional groups to be a reliable source of unbiased information on such matters and that their official positions would be based on the most up-to-date and scientifically sound...

Does anybody have any positive stories about the use of antidepressants? My doctor wants to put me on them because of chronic pain, but after everything I've read on FR I'm scared to death of them. Sorry for the vanity, but I can't think of a better bunch of folks to get feed-back from.

Since I first began working as a medical expert in product liability cases way back in the early 1990s, I’ve spent innumerable hours culling the sealed data contained within the files of companies like GlaxoSmithKline and Eli Lilly. Among other things, I long ago found evidence that Paxil and Prozac cause suicidality in adults. These discoveries then led to settlements in product liability suits brought against the two companies brought by surviving family members. I’ve also communicated my conclusions in books like Talking Back to Prozac and the Antidepressant Fact Book and in scientific articles but the primary data until...

[snip] (Standard Gravure shooting) First known shooting with ties to Prozac. Joseph Wesbecker kills 12, injures 9. Eric Harris age 17 (first on Zoloft then Luvox) and Dylan Klebold aged 18 (Columbine school shooting in Littleton, Colorado), killed 12 students and 1 teacher, and wounded 23 others, before killing themselves. Klebold’s medical records have never been made available to the public. Jeff Weise, age 16, had been prescribed 60 mg/day of Prozac (three times the average starting dose for adults!) when he shot his grandfather, his grandfather’s girlfriend and many fellow students at Red Lake, Minnesota. He then shot himself....

CBS) Advocates of medical marijuana say pot has all sorts of health benefits. Maybe so, but a new study from Australia suggests that smoking pot can drive some people crazy - or at least make them go crazy sooner than they would have if they had never picked up the pipe. The study, published online in "Archives of General Psychiatry," shows that potheads develop severe mental illnesses like schizophrenia about 2.7 years earlier than people who don't use marijuana.

The recent post "I am Adam Lanza's Mother" by a woman who posts at anarchistsoccermom and animatedly advertises herself wearing an "I love Che" t-shirt is as slick a piece of exploitative propaganda as anything we've seen in the last four years. Soon after the essay went viral mom blogger Liza Long appeared on CNN and the Today show calling for a national conversation on mental illness. After the Newtown massacre the self-described author, musician, Classicist and single mother of four felt compelled to share her own story. Long's written account of life with an out of control child focuses...

Psychiatrist James Knoll told CNN’s Headline News today that Adam Lanza, the perpetrator of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, was acting in a “ritualistic” way during the horrific events. Knoll, who does research at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University, said in a recent report that killers like Lanza see themselves as “pseudocommandos … driven by strong feelings of anger and resentment, in addition to having a paranoid character. He plans out the offense ritualistically, and comes prepared with a powerful arsenal of weapons.” The report continues: “[The pseudocommando] most often kills in public during the...

The emerging profile of Adam Lanza, the suspected shooter in the school massacre in Newtown, Conn., is depressingly familiar. He has been described as being socially awkward and a loner. He reportedly had Asperger's syndrome — a high-performing form of autism — and may have been afflicted by other psychiatric problems. And he was male. His sex almost goes without saying. According to Mother Jones, 62 mass shootings — defined as a single spree that killed at least four people — have been carried out in the U.S. since 1982. Only one was perpetrated by a female. In 2006, Jennifer...

President Obama said the federal government has to do something meaningful to prevent future shootings, like the recent massacre of 26 children and adults at a school in Newtown, Connecticut.  Here is what the federal government can do to prevent violence related to mental illness:1. Start demonstration projects of Assisted Outpatient Treatment (e.g. Kendra’s Law in New York, Laura’s Law in California) throughout the country. AOT allows courts to order individuals with mental illness to stay in treatment as a condition of living in the community. It is only applicable to the most seriously ill who have a history of violence, incarceration, or...

<p>“I live with a son who is mentally ill. I love my son. But he terrifies me.’’</p>

Ms Conte called the ordeal 'sad' for Lanza and his family, and suggested that the violence is a portion of a much larger situation. 'Guns are easy to point to, but it's really a mental health issue.'

As we reported last night, buried inside the NYT biopic of Newtown shooter Adam Lanza was arguably one of the most important missing pieces in the story, at least so far, which could provide clues into partially explaining yesterday's tragic loss of young life, namely that the 20 year old man suffered from Asperger Syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism (two conditions which are being merged in the upcoming update of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5) manual of mental disorders), which has been traditionally associated with social communication difficulties, including flat affect, and one which in some clinical studies...

[Full title: "Psychiatry goes insane: Every human emotion now classified as a mental disorder in new psychiatric manual DSM-5 "] (NaturalNews) The industry of modern psychiatry has officially gone insane. Virtually every emotion experienced by a human being -- sadness, grief, anxiety, frustration, impatience, excitement -- is now being classified as a "mental disorder" demanding chemical treatment (with prescription medications, of course). The new, upcoming DSM-5 "psychiatry bible," expected to be released in a few months, has transformed itself from a medical reference manual to a testament to the insanity of the industry itself. "Mental disorders" named in the DSM-5...

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — A south Charlotte psychiatric facility for teens is closing its doors in early February, leaving dozens of teens looking for new homes and 122 employees looking for new jobs. The Keys of Carolina officially notified the state this week that it was closing but has not said why. Eyewitness News uncovered it was facing a list of violations from the North Carolina Department of Health & Human Services and a $6,000 administrative fine, according to state officials, for violations of laws regarding the "protection from harm, abuse, neglect or exploitation" of patients. State officials said conditions in...