February 2015

Bring Back the Asylum?

February 5, 2015

By Paul Gionfriddo

The JAMA headline is pretty sensational: Improving Long-term Psychiatric Care: Bring Back the Asylum. And the article itself is generating a lot of discussion and debate.

But headlines can be misleading. As the authors write:

Precision Medicine, Mental Disorders and Toxic Stress

February 10, 2015

By Andrea Blanch, Ph.D. and David Shern, Ph.D.

As Thomas Insel, Director of the National Institute of Mental Health wrote in a recent blog, precision medicine is a hot new topic in the research world. The basic idea is simple: Get the “right treatment at the right time to the right person” by addressing the underlying cause of the disorder, not the symptoms. In practice, accomplishing this goal may be a bit more complicated.

In Response to the WSJ Op-Ed: Mentally Ill, Drink a Smoothie

February 12, 2015

By Debbie Plotnick, MSS MLSP

Dear E. Fuller Torrey and Doris Fuller:

Early Saturday morning, I saw the op-ed that you both authored which ran in the Wall Street Journal.

It pretty much was all I could think of over the weekend. At first I was very, very angry. This was because it hurt me personally, as a family member, as a mental health advocate, and as a social worker.