by Nassir Ghaemi | Apr 18, 2023 | Blog posts
Doctor: I’m giving you Cymbalta (duloxetine). Patient: I got manic and suicidal on SSRIs. Is it an SSRI? Doctor: Don’t worry. It’s a SNRI. Patient: Oh. This 19 year old male had experienced worsened suicidality twice previously with fluoxetine and sertraline. He knew...
by Nassir Ghaemi | Dec 8, 2022 | Blog posts
A few decades ago, the Harvard psychologist Brendan Maher made an unusual claim. People with delusions use the same rational process as non-delusional people. The distinction between being “psychotic” – that is, having delusions or hallucinations – and being...
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 | 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...