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...
by Nassir Ghaemi | Aug 17, 2022 | Blog posts
One of my former residents, who I supervised regularly, recently graduated & now is an attending physician herself. Now no longer the student, but the teacher, she asked me to advise her on my approach to teaching and mentoring. Here’s what I wrote to her: My...
