News

Writers of diagnostic criteria should consider their work and all its implications. What about adding a new disorder? What might that do to epidemiological capture? Depending on the characteristics of the diagnostic criteria set, many possibilities exist.

Addressing a few subjects that may have the potential to create a more insidious and enduring form of misrepresentation ... namely, the implications that psychiatrists must now “play the game,” and resign themselves to a bleak future of harried pill dispensing. 

Quiz on Suicide

During what season is suicide most common among college students? These questions and more in this week's quiz.

Dr. Joel Yager“How to Have a Career- and Make a Living- While having a Life: Career Planning in the Context of Life Planning”

The title of Gardiner Harris’s front-page story in the March 6 New York Times was blunt: “Talk Doesn’t Pay, So Psychiatry Turns Instead to Drug Therapy.” For those of us who see our profession as a humanistic calling, this piece is likely to provoke a mixture of sadness and anger.

In previous blogs and papers, I have done my level best to skewer the misuse of the misdiagnosis "Paraphilia NOS." I regard it as no more than a flimsy justification, concocted to allow the psychiatric incarceration of rapists who would otherwise have to be released from prison to the street.

I was asked three interesting questions by a psychologist with 15 years experience evaluating sexually violent predators. She has testified often--both for the prosecution and for the defense in the hearings that determine the legitimacy of involuntary psychiatric commitment under SVP statutes.

Psychiatrists can be enormously helpful, they have experience in dealing with very difficult problems and are less fazed than others by some of the difficulties that arise.