MDMA for PTSD
A lengthy article in last weekend’s Washington Post Magazine discusses the work of Michael Mithoefer, a psychiatrist at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) who has almost completed the...
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Film footage of the ice pick lobotomy
A forthcoming PBS documentary called The Lobotomist examines the career of psychiatrist Walter J. Freeman, who performed nearly 3,000 “ice pick” lobotomies during the late 1930s and 1940s. The...
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Sigmund Freud, cocaine & the birth of big pharma
SciCurious has written an interesting post about Sigmund Freud’s experiments with cocaine. Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, was also a pioneer of psychopharmacology; as well as being one of the...
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Uncle Prozac wants you
This week’s issue of Time has a cover story called America’s Medicated Army, about the increasing use of antidepressant and anti-anxiety drugs among U.S. troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. The...
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Mental retardation: A photo essay
In 1965, Senator Robert Kennedy visited several “institutions for the mentally retarded” in New York State. His descriptions of the conditions he found there, which were published widely in the media,...
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Neurobiology of a hallucination
Hallucinations are often associated with psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia or with LSD and related drugs. Hearing voices is a characteristic symptom which is reported by about 70% of...
View ArticleThe delusional brain
Delusions are pathological beliefs which persist despite clear evidence that they are actually false. They can vary widely in content, but are always characterized by the absolute certainty with which...
View ArticleFeeling blue, seeing gray: Reduced contrast sensitivity as a marker for...
DEPRESSION has long been associated with vision – and to colour perception in particular – and the link between them is evident in everyday language. Depression is, of course, often referred to as...
View ArticleThe secret history of psychedelic psychiatry
This post is part of a Nature Blog Focus on hallucinogenic drugs in medicine and mental health, inspired by a recent Nature Reviews Neuroscience paper, The neurobiology of psychedelic drugs:...
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Neurocriminology in prohibition-era New York
NEW York City in the 1920s and ’30s was a hotbed of criminal activity. Prohibition laws banning the production, sale and distribution of alcohol had been introduced, but instead of reducing crime, they...
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