Over at Slate I have a story, “The New Temper Tantrum Disorder,” about the “Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder” I wrote about more briefly here a couple weeks ago, when DMDD was still a proposed diagnosis. Last week the DMDD diagnosis was approved for inclusion in the American Psychiatric Association’s forthcoming Diagnostic Statistical Manual, Fifth Edition — […]
Continue reading →Earlier this week, I wrote a post criticizing Naomi Wolf’s use of science in her book “Vagina: A New Biography.” (See Naomi Wolf’s “Vagina” and the Perils of Neuro Self-Help, or How Dupe-amine Drove Me Into a Dark Dungeon.) My complaint was that Wolf treated an incredibly complex and ambiguous body of science — the neurobiology of […]
Continue reading →In an age of laboratory medicine, psychiatry’s reliance on interviews, confession, and often funky diagnoses remain the disciplines great bugbear. The move over the last two or three decades to ‘biological psychiatry,’ which got hijacked by the drug industry, has hovered between disappointment and disaster. Neurocritic looks at the dilemma from a neuroscientist’s point of view: […]
Continue reading →At Time, Maia Szalavitz tells of some really, really bad medicine: The new study, published in the Archives of General Psychiatry, found that in 2005-09 nearly two thirds of all antipsychotic prescriptions for youth were written for ADHD and other disruptive behavior disorders; these conditions accounted for 34% of all antipsychotic prescriptions for teens. Yet […]
Continue reading →From the muckraker troublemaker Dr. Ben Goldacre, of Bad Science fame: Medicine is broken. We like to imagine that it’s based on evidence and the results of fair tests. In reality, those tests are often profoundly flawed. We like to imagine that doctors are familiar with the research literature surrounding a drug, when in […]
Continue reading →As I noted a few days ago, I’m now one of the editor-reviewers at Download The Universe, a site dedicated to reviewing ebooks about science. My colleagues, there, who include some of science writing’s best, have already reviewed books on exoplanets, superorganisms, doomsday, and contagious cancer, to name only the most recent. Below is my first […]
Continue reading →Is there such a thing as too much good cheer? I argue more or less that over at the new science e-book site Download The Universe, where in dismay I’ve reviewed the TED Book “SMILE: The Astonishing Power of a Simple Act.” As I noted last week, Download The Universe is a collaborative effort of several […]
Continue reading →If you care about how science writers collide with science to produce science writing — and if you’re reading anything at Wired Science, you do care, whether you realize it or not — then you’ll probably love this interview with Steve Silberman at the Open Notebook, where Steve relates how he wrote “The Placebo Problem,” a superb Wired […]
Continue reading →A while back I considered writing a book about sleep. I’ve learned since that’s a sure sign predictor of a good NY Times story sometime in the following 5 to 10 years. So here it is: The latest science on sleep. In the same vein as the old kissthisguy.com, McSweeney’s brings us a great new […]
Continue reading →31 Aug 2013: The public memo below, asking jouranlist Alison Bass to correct serious errors she published in a November 2010 post at her site, was originally published at my Posterous site in late 2010, soon after her post. I wrote it because a) Bass had failed to correct her original post with the false accusations, […]
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