Melissa Raven

U.S. nursing homes are fabricating schizophrenia diagnoses to hide their use of dangerous antipsychotic drugs to subdue dementia patients, a government watchdog report found. The drugs increase risk of falls, strokes and death. wapo.st/4tfSUsr

U.S. nursing homes are fabricating schizophrenia diagnoses to hide their use of dangerous antipsychotic drugs to subdue dementia patients, a government watchdog report found. The drugs increase risk of falls, strokes and death. wapo.st/4tfSUsr

U.S. nursing homes are fabricating schizophrenia diagnoses to hide their use of dangerous antipsychotic drugs to subdue dementia patients, a government watchdog report found. The drugs increase risk of falls, strokes and death. wapo.st/4tfSUsr

U.S. nursing homes are fabricating schizophrenia diagnoses to hide their use of dangerous antipsychotic drugs to subdue dementia patients, a government watchdog report found. The drugs increase risk of falls, strokes and death. wapo.st/4tfSUsr

@NickTaber I don’t believe the general public understands the dangers of these drugs

Are psychedelics better than antidepressants? New study says no eurekalert.org/news-releases/… jamanetwork.com/journals/jamap… With an innovative approach, scientists try to get around the problem of participant expectation in tests of psychedelics. Psychedelic-assisted therapy may be no more effective than traditional antidepressants when patients know what drugs they are actually taking, according to a first-of-its kind analysis that compared how well each type of drug worked for major depression. Psychedelic-assisted therapy has resisted placebo-controlled testing methods — the gold standard in clinical trial design. Due to their powerful subjective effects, nearly everyone in the trial knows whether they received a psychedelic or the placebo even if they are not told. But in trials of antidepressants, participants may not figure out whether they have received the drug or a placebo, which makes it hard to compare them with psychedelics. To get around this problem, researchers from UC San Francisco, UCLA, and Imperial College, London tried a different approach. They compared the results from psychedelic therapy trials to the results from so-called open-label trials of traditional antidepressants, in which the participants all knew they were getting an antidepressant. That way, both treatments benefitted equally from the positive effect of patients knowing that they were being given a drug instead of a placebo. The findings both surprised and disappointed them: there was virtually no difference. “Unblinding is the defining methodological problem of psychedelic trials. What I wanted to show is that even if you compare psychedelics to open-label antidepressants, psychedelics are still much better,” said Balázs Szigeti, PhD, a clinical data scientist at UCSF’s Translational Psychedelic Research Program, who led the study. “Unfortunately, what we got is the opposite result — that they are the same, which is very surprising given the enthusiasm around psychedelics and mental health.” Szigeti is the co-first author of the paper with Zachary J. Williams, MD, PhD, of UCLA; Hannah Barnett, MSc, of Imperial College, London is also an author. The study appeared March 18 in JAMA Psychiatry.

@PGtzsche1 Medication decisions in pregnancy are rarely simple—untreated severe depression or suicidality in a mother carries real risks too, which is why clinicians usually weigh the potential medication risks against the dangers of leaving serious illness untreated.

First realising you have #PSSD can be really tough. Due to limited recognition, many are left to navigate their symptoms in isolation. People with PSSD often learn about their symptoms online, eventually finding support through virtual communities. If you could give one piece of advice to someone discovering PSSD for the first time, what would it be? What do you wish you had been told when you first discovered it? Share your thoughts ⬇️