In Practice

Bullet points noted down in the airport waiting lounge, en route home from the American Psychiatric Association’s annual meeting.

What do doctors actually do at the big psychiatric convention?

Are the mentally ill especially creative? If so (or if not), should afflicted writers and artists seek treatment?

Can't tell a finjan from its zarf or an assegai from a nilgai? Worrying about a loss of the cryptic . . .

In response to reports that the Veterans Administration has concealed the rate of suicides . . . A quick Google scan suggests that the media continues to ignore . . . I know, she won by almost ten percentage points . . . and more

Two veterans’ groups and a number of news sources are claiming that the Federal government has systematically and intentionally underreported the suicide rate among former soldiers.

There’s major news on the antidepressant front, but it comes in an odd form: research on treating “lazy eyes” in rats. A study suggests that, yes, Prozac and similar medicines really do make the brain more flexible.

The New York Times science section today features an essay on the long-term use of antidepressants. The lead refers to the sort of question I introduced in Listening to Prozac: how do medications shape identity? But most of the piece concerns the biological effects of taking the drugs for years.

Is there such a thing as a “chemical imbalance,” a dysregulation of neurotransmitters in the brain that can be linked to mood disorders? A scientific overview this year in the New England Journal of Medicine attests to the vitality of a theory prematurely declared dead.

Do antidepressants work? They do. New evidence comes from a study of children and adolescents, patients in age groups where the efficacy of antidepressants has been hard to demonstrate. It’s just the sort of research that critics of drug trials ought to find convincing.