by Nassir Ghaemi | Dec 1, 2022 | Blog posts
When I was in psychiatry residency, one of the consistent teachings we received was that we needed to learn to become comfortable with uncertainty. And that we had to transfer that idea to our patients, because life is uncertain. In later years, I wondered how much of...
by Nassir Ghaemi | Nov 11, 2022 | Blog posts
The concept of diagnostic hierarchy was explained for psychiatry a century ago by the German psychiatrist Karl Jaspers. The idea is that not all diagnoses are created equal; some are more important or more primary than others. For instance, alcohol-induced psychosis,...
by Nassir Ghaemi | Oct 24, 2022 | Blog posts
A recent paper on lithium and suicide is an excellent example of how to mislead with meta-analysis. It is pseudoscience at its finest. The authors are major critics of the pharmaceutical industry; they claim that drugs are over-hyped. What pharmaceutical company...
by Nassir Ghaemi | Oct 18, 2022 | Curbside Consults
Q. Is psychotic depression yet another form of depression? Or is psychotic depression the same as manic depression? What is the difference between the two? I know that depression is qualified as neurosis and manic depression as psychosis. What about psychotic...
by Nassir Ghaemi | Sep 30, 2022 | Blog posts
The serotonin hypothesis of depression, which became popular from the 1990s until now, is false, and has been known to be false for a long time, and never was proven to begin with. The norepinephrine hypothesis of depression, which preceded the serotonin hypothesis in...
