By Todd Essig
Forbes: Leadership
Originally published April 23, 2012
An intentionally provocative opinion piece about psychotherapy was just published in the NY Times by Jonathan Alpert. Well, it worked. I’ve been provoked. Alpert is an apparently proud fellow who uses his web-site to trumpet being called “Manhattan’s most media-friendly psychotherapist.” In the article he lays claim to a style of psychotherapy that is a unique advance because unlike others he actually helps patients change. Other people, people like me, what we do is waste our patients lives so we can get paid. According to him relaxing “spa appointments” rather than anything useful are what people get from me and my kind.
How did this get past the Times editors? It is so clearly designed as an infomercial for selling the author’s go-for-the-gusto change-your-life in 28 days book. Plus the article is dangerous. It perpetuates the myth that psychotherapy is inefficient, ineffective snake oil, relaxing to be sure but snake oil nonetheless. In so doing it erects an unnecessary conceptual obstacle to getting help that someone might need.
The entire response to Mr. Alpert's article is here.
Thanks to Richard Ievoli for this article. He could have been a contender.
Friday, April 27, 2012
In Therapy Forever? Enough Already
By Jonathan Alpert
The New York Times - Sunday Review - Opinion
Originally published April 22, 2012
MY therapist called me the wrong name. I poured out my heart; my doctor looked at his watch. My psychiatrist told me I had to keep seeing him or I would be lost.
The New York Times - Sunday Review - Opinion
Originally published April 22, 2012
New patients tell me things like this all the time. And they tell me how former therapists sat, listened, nodded and offered little or no advice, for weeks, months, sometimes years. A patient recently told me that, after seeing her therapist for several years, she asked if he had any advice for her. The therapist said, “See you next week.”
When I started practicing as a therapist 15 years ago, I thought complaints like this were anomalous. But I have come to a sobering conclusion over the years: ineffective therapy is disturbingly common.
Thursday, April 26, 2012
A Sharp Rise in Retractions Prompts Calls for Reform
By Carl Zimmer
The New York Times
Originally published April 16, 2012
In the fall of 2010, Dr. Ferric C. Fang made an unsettling discovery. Dr. Fang, who is editor in chief of the journal Infection and Immunity, found that one of his authors had doctored several papers.
The New York Times
Originally published April 16, 2012
In the fall of 2010, Dr. Ferric C. Fang made an unsettling discovery. Dr. Fang, who is editor in chief of the journal Infection and Immunity, found that one of his authors had doctored several papers.
It was a new experience for him. “Prior to that time,” he said in an interview, “Infection and Immunity had only retracted nine articles over a 40-year period.”
The journal wound up retracting six of the papers from the author, Naoki Mori of the University of the Ryukyus in Japan. And it soon became clear that Infection and Immunity was hardly the only victim of Dr. Mori’s misconduct. Since then, other scientific journals have retracted two dozen of his papers, according to the watchdog blog Retraction Watch.
The Flight From Conversation
By Sherry Turkle
The New York Times - Opinion
The Sunday Review
Originally published April 21, 2012
The New York Times - Opinion
The Sunday Review
Originally published April 21, 2012
WE live in a technological universe in which we are always communicating. And yet we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection.
At home, families sit together, texting and reading e-mail. At work executives text during board meetings. We text (and shop and go on Facebook) during classes and when we’re on dates. My students tell me about an important new skill: it involves maintaining eye contact with someone while you text someone else; it’s hard, but it can be done.
Over the past 15 years, I’ve studied technologies of mobile connection and talked to hundreds of people of all ages and circumstances about their plugged-in lives. I’ve learned that the little devices most of us carry around are so powerful that they change not only what we do, but also who we are.
We’ve become accustomed to a new way of being “alone together.” Technology-enabled, we are able to be with one another, and also elsewhere, connected to wherever we want to be. We want to customize our lives. We want to move in and out of where we are because the thing we value most is control over where we focus our attention. We have gotten used to the idea of being in a tribe of one, loyal to our own party.
Thanks to Lou Moskowitz for this story.
This story has implications for face-to-face psychotherapy as well as online therapy.
This story has implications for face-to-face psychotherapy as well as online therapy.
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
As Beef Cattle Become Behemoths, Who Are Animal Scientists Serving?
By Melody Petersen
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Originally published on April 15, 2012
Here are some exerpts:
Scores of animal scientists employed by public universities have helped pharmaceutical companies persuade farmers and ranchers to use antibiotics, hormones, and drugs like Zilmax to make their cattle grow bigger ever faster. With the use of these products, the average weight of a fattened steer sold to a packing plant is now roughly 1,300 pounds—up from 1,000 pounds in 1975.
It's been a profitable venture for the drug companies, as well as for the professors and their universities. Agriculture schools increasingly depend on the industry for research grants, a sizable portion of which cover overhead and administrative costs. And many professors now add to their personal bank accounts by working for the companies as consultants and speakers. More than two-thirds of animal scientists reported in a 2005 survey that they had received money from industry in the previous five years.
Yet unlike a growing number of medical schools around the country, where administrators have recently tightened rules to better police their faculty's ties to pharmaceutical companies, the schools of agriculture have largely rejected critics' concerns about industry cash. Administrators have set few limits on how much corporate money agricultural professors can accept. Faculty work with industry is governed by confidentiality rules that veil it from public view.
The entire story is here.
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Originally published on April 15, 2012
Here are some exerpts:
Scores of animal scientists employed by public universities have helped pharmaceutical companies persuade farmers and ranchers to use antibiotics, hormones, and drugs like Zilmax to make their cattle grow bigger ever faster. With the use of these products, the average weight of a fattened steer sold to a packing plant is now roughly 1,300 pounds—up from 1,000 pounds in 1975.It's been a profitable venture for the drug companies, as well as for the professors and their universities. Agriculture schools increasingly depend on the industry for research grants, a sizable portion of which cover overhead and administrative costs. And many professors now add to their personal bank accounts by working for the companies as consultants and speakers. More than two-thirds of animal scientists reported in a 2005 survey that they had received money from industry in the previous five years.
Yet unlike a growing number of medical schools around the country, where administrators have recently tightened rules to better police their faculty's ties to pharmaceutical companies, the schools of agriculture have largely rejected critics' concerns about industry cash. Administrators have set few limits on how much corporate money agricultural professors can accept. Faculty work with industry is governed by confidentiality rules that veil it from public view.
The entire story is here.
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Should 'Mental Health Checkups' Be Made Part Of Health Care In Schools?
Medical News Today
Originally published April 16, 2012
"The early detection of children who are showing psychiatric symptoms or are at the risk of a mental disorder is crucial, but introducing "mental health checkups" as part of health care in schools is not altogether simple," says David Gyllenberg, MD, whose doctoral dissertation "Childhood Predictors of Later Psychotropic Medication Use and Psychiatric Hospital Treatment - Findings from the Finnish Nationwide 1981 Birth Cohort Study" was publically examined at the University of Helsinki on 13 April 2012.
In Gyllenberg's study, the mental wellbeing of nearly 6,000 Finnish children of the age of eight was charted through a survey carried out in 1989. After this, the use of psychotropic medication and psychiatric hospital periods of the same children from the age of 12 to 25 was followed up.
The entire story is here.
Originally published April 16, 2012
"The early detection of children who are showing psychiatric symptoms or are at the risk of a mental disorder is crucial, but introducing "mental health checkups" as part of health care in schools is not altogether simple," says David Gyllenberg, MD, whose doctoral dissertation "Childhood Predictors of Later Psychotropic Medication Use and Psychiatric Hospital Treatment - Findings from the Finnish Nationwide 1981 Birth Cohort Study" was publically examined at the University of Helsinki on 13 April 2012. In Gyllenberg's study, the mental wellbeing of nearly 6,000 Finnish children of the age of eight was charted through a survey carried out in 1989. After this, the use of psychotropic medication and psychiatric hospital periods of the same children from the age of 12 to 25 was followed up.
The entire story is here.
A Spate of Teenage Suicides Alarms Russians
By Glenn Kates
The New York Times
Originally published April 19, 2012
Russia has been hit with a wave of copycat teenage suicides so pronounced that President Dmitri A. Medvedev felt compelled on Thursday to warn news media outlets against making too much of the deaths, for fear of attracting more imitators.
The New York Times
Originally published April 19, 2012
“It is indeed very alarming and serious, but it does not mean that it is a snowball that will become bigger and bigger every year,” Mr. Medvedev said. “This must be treated extremely gently.”
The spike in teenage suicides began in February, when two 14-year-old girls jumped hand in hand from the 16th-floor roof of an apartment building in suburban Moscow. Afterward, a series of apartment jumps attracted national attention.
Over 24 hours starting on April 9, there were at least six deaths. A girl, 16, jumped from an unfinished hospital in Siberia, while five others hanged themselves: a boy, 15, who died in the city of Perm two days after his mother found him hanging; another 15-year-old, who killed himself on his birthday, in Nizhny Novgorod, a city on the Volga River; teenagers in the northern city of Lomonosov and in Samara; and a 16-year-old murder suspect who used his prison bedsheet to kill himself in Krasnoyarsk.
Monday, April 23, 2012
Do Bioethics Really Matter?
By Arthur Kaplan
Book Review published in The Lancet
Malignant: Medical Ethicists Confront Cancer by Rebecca Dresser
Originally published April 14, 2012
Malignant is a book that I am sure will catch the eye of many readers of this journal. Not because it is a collection of essays by people who have either had cancer or who cared for loved ones who did. Many books cover that ground. Not because it is a collection of essays by distinguished American bioethicists, including Norman Fost, Leon Kass, Daniel W Brock, and Rebecca Dresser. There are lots of bioethics collections authored by eminent scholars around too. This book will command attention because the bioethicists writing the essays are also the very same people who had the cancer or helped loved ones who did.
The book thus raises the obvious question—in facing cancer, did the contributors fare any better for all their scholarly expertise in bioethics? Or, did cancer prove to be the great leveller, leaving all who talk for a living about moral theory and normative argument tongue-tied as each learned what the real world of serious sickness is all about? Did careers of offering opinions to others in and out of health care about how to behave, speak, and respond make a whit of difference to the personal experience each of the contributors had in their own intimate struggles with cancer?
Sunday, April 22, 2012
J.&J. Fined $1.2 Billion in Drug Case
By Katie Thomas
The New York Times
Originally published April 11, 2012
A judge in Arkansas ordered Johnson & Johnson and a subsidiary to pay more than $1.2 billion in fines on Wednesday, a day after a jury found that the companies had minimized or concealed the dangers associated with an antipsychotic drug.
Here is a prior story about Johnson and Johnson with Risperdal.
The New York Times
Originally published April 11, 2012
A judge in Arkansas ordered Johnson & Johnson and a subsidiary to pay more than $1.2 billion in fines on Wednesday, a day after a jury found that the companies had minimized or concealed the dangers associated with an antipsychotic drug.
The fine, which experts said ranked among the largest on record for a state fraud case involving a drug company, is the most recent in a string of legal losses for Johnson & Johnson related to its marketing of the drug, Risperdal.
In January, Texas settled a similar case with the subsidiary, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, for $158 million. Last year, a South Carolina judge levied civil penalties of $327 million against Janssen, and in 2010, a Louisiana jury awarded nearly $258 million in damages.
Here is a prior story about Johnson and Johnson with Risperdal.
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