Michael Ostacher, MD, MPH

Why did a legendary judge call psychiatrists ‘wizards’? Bazelon, 1974. After trusting psychiatry 18 years, then flipped: •Too much jargon: ‘in my experience [psychiatrists] try to limit their [opinions] to conclusory statements couched in psychiatric terminology.’ •Example? ‘Labeling a person "schizophrenic" does not make him so!’ •Too little evidence: ‘Psychiatrists have not understood is that conclusory labels are no substitute [ ] for facts derived from disciplined investigation.’ •Dishonesty: ‘Psychiatrists have justified fudging their testimony on “dangerousness” -a ground for involuntary confinement-when they were convinced that an individual was too sick to seek help voluntarily.’ •Overreach: Using a medical model for ‘social and political’ issues. •Ignorance: Applying ‘conclusory labels to [patients]-without explaining the origin, development or manifestation of a disease in terms comprehensible.’ •Fragility: ‘For monitoring the performance of a profession there is no substitute, in the end, for the adversary process.’ If Bazelon sounds anti psychiatry, maybe we should be more understanding of the critics of psychiatry.

Forensic psychiatrist here. I have seen many people mature while in prison.

MAGA posted this. Who wants to tell them?

This is a garbage study. They did the experiment a first time and the effect was obviously not real: 31.05 IQ points from just telling people a slight lie about how well they slept. In experiment 2, that dropped to 12 points. And then it failed to replicate.

Few things will radicalize you more than seeing what the world looked like 30 years ago.

Adolescent fluoxetine produced lasting ⬇️ ERK-CREB signaling activation in hippocampus & prefrontal cortex, as well as ⬇️ in proBDNF & mature BDNF protein in prefrontal cortex. Total ERK & CREB protein levels were unchanged, indicating ⬇️ signaling, not ⬇️ protein expression. 3/n