Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Tulio Giraldi . Tulio Giraldi is a researcher and teacher of pharmacology and clinical psychology at the University of Trieste, currently Visiting Professor at the Department of Global Health & Social Science at the King’s College London.  The topics of his basic and clinical research have been cancer chemotherapy, together with the pharmacology of the central nervous system and the responses to stress. More recently, he has been researching the role of genetic polymorphisms in mental health, and the pharmacogenetics of the response of psychiatric drugs. In this post he talks about his book Unhappiness, Sadness and Depression . According to the World Health Organization (WHO), an epidemic of depression is spreading around the world, expected to become by 2020 the second leading cause of world disability and by 2030 to be the largest contributor to disease burden. The serious concern for depression and antidepressant drugs led me to analyze all the a...

Is Evidence-Based Psychiatry Ethical? This post is by Mona Gupta , psychiatrist and bioethics researcher at the University of Montreal in Canada. For the last 15 years, I’ve been working on ethical issues relating to the use of evidence-based medicine (EBM) in psychiatric practice. EBM has been enormously influential in clinical medicine, particularly in psychiatry. This intersection between ethics, EBM and psychiatry is the theme I develop in my new book, Is Evidence-Based Psychiatry Ethical? , published by Oxford University Press in 2014. EBM is a phrase that first appeared in the medical literature in the 1990s. It promotes a seemingly irrefutable principle: that clinical decision-making should be based, as much as possible, on the most up-to-date research findings. Nowhere has this idea been more welcome than in psychiatry, a field that continues to be dogged by a legacy of controversial clinical interventions. Many mental health experts believe that following the rules...