Psych Drug News Roundup
* The FDA contemplates adding warnings about possible psychoses caused by popular ADHD drugs such as Ritalin, Adderall, and Strattera.
*Los Angeles law firm Baum Hedlund files a class-action suit against GlaxoSmithKline over youth suicides allegedly caused by Paxil.
*Largest-ever study on treating depression with drugs finds that if one doesn't work, another might. Apparently good news for treatability–"the new findings mean that roughly half of people who suffer from depression can get over it, not just improve their symptoms, with adequate medication," says a CBS/AP report. But bad news for our actual understanding of what it all means, since
the drugs used in the study–Celexa, Wellbutrin, Zoloft and Effexor–work in very different ways yet had roughly equal effectiveness when it came to treating depression. This suggests that the underlying brain mechanisms of depression are far more complicated than simple notions of a single chemical imbalance…
In news only tangentially related to psychiatric drugs, last night's "Return of Chef" episode of South Park was peculiar in peculiar ways, not really a gut-buster or full-on well-targeted assault, and appeared to solve the "Chef's Voice" problem by cutting and pasting old Isaac Hayes lines. It did roughly seem to analogize Scientology to a weird club of old-fashioned gentlemen adventurers secretly (or not-so-secretly) dedicated to child sexual abuse, but this seemed more random than a well-thought-out comic conceit.