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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
