psychiatry

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Freshly Aired: Big Pharma and Psychiatry

July 16, 2010 | 2 comments

A lot of the public doesn’t realize how sophisticated the [pharmaceutical industry's] marketing techniques have become, really over the last 10 years… Essentially when a pharmaceutical company gets FDA approval for a drug, their marketing department can assure their bosses that they are going to be able to sell the drug, really whether the drug is effective or not.
Dr. Daniel Carlat, psychiatrist
Fresh Air, July 13, 2010

Emphasis in the final sentence is mine.

Dr. Carlat’s current book is Unhinged: The Trouble with Psychiatry – A Doctor’s Revelations about a Profession in Crisis. He was previously the author of a 2007 New York Times Magazine article entitled “Dr. Drug Rep,” about his experience being paid by Wyeth Pharmaceuticals to sing the praises of its anti-depressant Effexor to his colleagues; he also talks about it at length in the Fresh Air interview.

Carlat is a psychiatrist in private practice in Newburyport, Massachusetts, an Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine, and the publisher of The Carlat Psychiatry Report. Oh, and he’s also a blogger. How he is all of these things at once I cannot fucking imagine.


Get Psyched – The Doctor Is In

March 10, 2009 | 2 comments

In Treatment - Season 2The second season of HBO’s brilliant drama series In Treatment is finally almost here. I haven’t been this geeked for the next episode of a TV show since The Shield ended.

If you didn’t act upon my entreaty to watch In Treatment during its first season, don’t beat yourself up, because I couldn’t walk the walk myself. I was going without any TV service at the time, and after the first 15 or so episodes HBO stopped streaming them for free on its website. Now, fortunately, there are remedies for dramatic completists like me who need to catch up:

  1. If you have HBO, you have until March 15 to check out any of the first 20 episodes via HBO on Demand. Presumably, after that they’ll have episodes 21-43 available the same way.
  2. HBO’s bogarting of the In Treatment Season One DVD set ends March 24. So great is my esteem for the show, I may just pre-order it.

If you’re not familiar with the show, here’s my attempt at a brief run-down. Psychotherapist Paul Weston (Gabriel Byrne, pictured above) conducts weekly sessions with four different clients, and each session is depicted as one half-hour episode of the series. Paul’s Fridays are dramatized as his weekly visitations of his mentor Gina (Dianne Weist), who apprehensively counsels him on his own abundant issues despite questionable ethics of doing so.

In a broader sense, In Treatment is all about ethical dilemmas. Read the rest of this entry »