Prozac Nation No More?

Newsweek has a feel good interview with a psychiatrist who is against the use of Prozac.

In a new book, psychiatrist James Gordon explains why he believes there's a more effective and drug-free way to treat depression and anxiety. James Gordon, founder of the Center for Mind-Body Medicine in Washington, D.C., says there's a better way to treat depression—through diet, exercise and meditation. Roll your eyes all you like. He's used the approach for 35 years with a wide range of patients, from runaway children and middle-class adults in Washington, D.C., to victims of war in Bosnia, Kosovo, Israel and the Gaza Strip.

We remain skeptical about psychiatry in general. But we are pleased that someone did not fall for the marketing madness

Washington D.C. Bill Could Require Licenses for Drug Reps

As seen in the WSJ Health Blog. This not only looks promising, but it seems to be a reasonable solution for an area where their have been multiple problems. We'll need to see how this works out, but it might be useful in other jurisdictions.

Drug sales reps could soon join cosmetologists, plumbers and funeral directors in line to get licenses to practice their trade in Washington, D.C. The D.C. council passed a bill yesterday that would require licenses and compliance with a set of rules governing professional practices for reps.

The bill explicitly bars reps from “any deceptive or misleading marketing of a pharmaceutical product, including the knowing concealment, suppression, omission, misleading representation or misstatement of any material fact.” It also prohibits promoting drugs for unapproved uses. New reps would be required to have a college degree. And bill would allow the D.C. Board of Pharmacy to collect information from reps regarding their interactions with health care providers.

[...]

The bill would also create a so-called “academic detailing program” in D.C. Academic detailing is a sort of ‘unsales pitch‘ that uses drug reps’ techniques to teach doctors when a cheap generic drug is as good as a more expensive branded one.

The bill must be signed by the mayor, who the Washington Post says supports the measure. Congress also has veto power over D.C.’s local ordinances — though given the skepticism toward pharma in Congress these days, it seems unlikely that a veto will come into play here.

[...]

Washington DC Mayor to Pull Children From Rotenberg Center.

A seen in this report, at least some politicians are doing the right thing, and getting the children out of this horrible place.

Mayor Adrian Fenty’s administration will get nine local children out of a Massachusetts shock-therapy clinic “within 90 days,” the mayor’s top adviser told The Examiner.

“It is unacceptable. Absolutely unacceptable to have our kids at that school,” said Peter Nickles, Fenty’s legal adviser, referring to the Judge Rotenberg Center. “We are taking steps right now so that within 90 days, those kids will be out of the Rotenberg school.”

As reported by The Examiner, dozens of mentally disabled children from the District of Columbia have been farmed out to Rotenberg for more than a decade, costing the public millions of dollars.

The center specializes in “aversive therapy” such as electroshock backpacks and has been the subject of dozens of abuse complaints to Massachusetts authorities for more than a decade.

The Examiner reported last week that Massachusetts officials have opened a criminal investigation after a Rotenberg student made a prank phone call and ordered three of his fellows hooked up to electric-shock machines.

Two of the students were shocked at least 77 times, state documents show.

E-mails obtained by The Examiner show that D.C. officials continued to refer students to Rotenberg even after Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee ordered the clinic stricken from the approved vendors list. Despite evidence that city officials were behind the blunder, Nickles blamed the children’s parents and their lawyers for standing in the way of getting the kids out of Rotenberg.

“We’re going to talk to parents,” Nickles said. “We’re in the process of finding alternative placements and we’re going to get this done.”

Documents obtained by The Examiner show that school officials have tried but failed to find alternate schools for the students at Rotenberg. Part of the problem is that at least four of the students are at least 18 years old and few other schools will take in adults, internal e-mails show.

Rotenberg spokesman Ernest Corrigan didn’t respond to requests for comment.

News of Nickles’ promise was welcomed by District Council Member Mary Cheh, D-Ward 3, an outspoken critic of Rotenberg — and the D.C. bureaucrats who consigned the city’s children there.

“All I can say is, the sooner, the better,” Cheh told The Examiner. “It should have been done before now.”

Study of Bush's psyche touches a nerve

While we try to avoid politics, This particular item is of interest. We have added emphasis to the portion we feel is particularly insightful. As seen in the Guardian

A study funded by the US government has concluded that conservatism can be explained psychologically as a set of neuroses rooted in "fear and aggression, dogmatism and the intolerance of ambiguity".

As if that was not enough to get Republican blood boiling, the report's four authors linked Hitler, Mussolini, Ronald Reagan and the rightwing talkshow host, Rush Limbaugh, arguing they all suffered from the same affliction.

All of them "preached a return to an idealised past and condoned inequality".

Republicans are demanding to know why the psychologists behind the report, Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition, received $1.2m in public funds for their research from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

The authors also peer into the psyche of President George Bush, who turns out to be a textbook case. The telltale signs are his preference for moral certainty and frequently expressed dislike of nuance.

"This intolerance of ambiguity can lead people to cling to the familiar, to arrive at premature conclusions, and to impose simplistic cliches and stereotypes," the authors argue in the Psychological Bulletin.

One of the psychologists behind the study, Jack Glaser, said the aversion to shades of grey and the need for "closure" could explain the fact that the Bush administration ignored intelligence that contradicted its beliefs about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

The authors, presumably aware of the outrage they were likely to trigger, added a disclaimer that their study "does not mean that conservatism is pathological or that conservative beliefs are necessarily false".

Another author, Arie Kruglanski, of the University of Maryland, said he had received hate mail since the article was published, but he insisted that the study "is not critical of conservatives at all". "The variables we talk about are general human dimensions," he said. "These are the same dimensions that contribute to loyalty and commitment to the group. Liberals might be less intolerant of ambiguity, but they may be less decisive, less committed, less loyal."

But what drives the psychologists? George Will, a Washington Post columnist who has long suffered from ingrained conservatism, noted, tartly: "The professors have ideas; the rest of us have emanations of our psychological needs and neuroses."

You can download the paper here:

Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition