I spent most of the week and last weekend down in sunny Austin, TX attending SXSW and presenting on the future of healthcare, with a decidedly un-Health 2.0 bent (focusing on traditional EMRs, not the hot and sexy PHRs everyone else is talking about). With e-Patients and Health 2.0 the focus of the rest of the world, SXSW is a fun time to connect with designers, developers and entrepreneurs, and heck, even Mark Zuckerberg (the $1.5 billion 23-year-old CEO of Facebook). No, I didn’t get a chance to “hang out” with Mark, but I did enjoy the entertaining keynote he delivered, although the entertainment was provided more so by the reporter, Sarah Lacy, rather than the straight-faced Zuckerberg (who woodenly sticks to his PR-driven buzzwords and vanilla answers — the guy mentioned providing for more “empathetic” communications via Facebook over a dozen times! What does that even mean? Does he know?).

So anyway, a lot happened over the past week around the blogosphere and I have to catch up to speed…

• Liz Spikol writes an excellent entry about the mental health parity bill in the U.S. Congress and our continuing reliance on the outdated “medical model” of mental illness. The only people who believe the medical model is still a valid model for mental disorders are usually those with a direct agenda such a model promotes — e.g., if it’s a biochemical disease, it must be curable via psychiatric medications. The more accepted bio-psycho-social model of mental disorder acknowledges the importance of two other important factors in the equation — psychological and social (or environment) –factors so often overlooked in treatment today.
• Tar Parker-Pope’s Well New York Times blog mentions how women who have unresolved conflicts with their own parents have more difficulty in making the transition to motherhood with their first newborn.
• Two entries from Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry deserve your attention. The first, Psychiatric Meds Still Generate Buckets of Money, discusses how IMS Health released some 2007 sales data on prescription medications and showed antidepressants still lead the pack in number of prescriptions, while the more pricey antipsychotics (led by Seroquel) lead in sales revenues. The second entry, Would the British Psychological Society Like Bacon with the Egg on Its Face?, provides the wrap-up on the conclusion of the unfortunate Lisa Blakemore Brown case in the U.K., where the psychologist was persecuted by the British Psychological Society (BPS) on the question of her own mental health. They concluded their investigation and found no professional misconduct on the part of the Blakemore Brown. Meanwhile her life is in ruins and she has resigned from the BPS. Here’s more on this too…
• Dr. Deb last week posted a great entry about snoring and what can be done about it to help. Vaughn over at Mind Hacks takes on the media coverage surrounding insomnia, which seems to have made the media rounds in the past week for no particular reason (other than well-placed PR).
• Furious Seasons continues to follow the ever-growing number of states who are suing Eli Lilly over Zyprexa claims, with Connecticut joining the other nine. The core of the claims are all pretty much similar:
  

  “Connecticut is looking to recover more than $190 million the state spent on Zyprexa over many years, on the grounds that Lilly illegally marked the drug for unapproved uses and concealed risks associated with the drug.

  “‘The illegal marketing campaign exploited children and senior citizens — causing severe weight gain, diabetes and cardiovascular problems,’ Blumenthal said in a statement. ‘This scheme involved payments to public officials, bogus educational events and ghostwritten promotional articles summarizing suspect studies.’”

  Which only goes to show you can make the best psychiatric medication in the world, but if your marketing and sales organization screws things up, it’s going to cost you more than you ever made in sales on that drug. Hopefully a wake-up call to the industry to sell medications on their approved merits.

• Want to practice more self-control? Be prepared to expend some serious energy to do so, as Cognitive Daily shows us in a detailed blog entry from last week that describes the actual work performed to stop us from doing something. Also check out their more recent interesting entry on what makes a kid cute.

Dr. John Grohol is the CEO and founder of Psych Central. He is an author, researcher and expert in mental health online, and has been writing about online behavior, mental health and psychology issues -- as well as the intersection of technology and human behavior -- since 1992. Dr. Grohol sits on the editorial board of the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking and is a founding board member and treasurer of the Society for Participatory Medicine.

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mental health » Blog Archive » Friday Roundup for March 14, 2008 (3/14/2008)

The Promise of Sleep - Book — Cute Toys and Bears (3/16/2008)

    Last reviewed: By John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on 14 Mar 2008
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