A week ago, an op-ed appeared in the New York Times by L. Alan Sroufe, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development, questioning society’s reliance on medications to help children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). He suggested that Ritalin has “gone wrong,” in that we simply rely too heavily on drugs to treat childhood disorders.

He starts off the op-ed, “As a psychologist who has been studying the development of troubled children for more than 40 years, I believe we should be asking why we rely so heavily on these drugs.”

Like most professionals who are trying to boil down decades worth of research into a layperson-friendly length, Dr. Sroufe unfortunately glosses over the psychological literature and what we know (and don’t know) about ADHD medications.

I will say this before we begin… most children would benefit not just from being prescribed an ADHD medication, but also getting specific psychological treatment as well. Few child psychologists and child specialists would be happy if their patients were only getting the benefits of one type of treatment, and many would agree that parents are too quick to medicate before trying non-medication options.

If companies are people, my friend, like Mitt Romney famously described in Iowa in August 2011, then we’re feeling a little bad for our fellow person called Janssen Pharmaceuticals, a division of health care giant Johnson & Johnson.

They just got dinged with a $158 million settlement in a Medicaid fraud case in Texas for “making false or misleading statements about the safety, cost and effectiveness of the expensive anti-psychotic medication Risperdal, and improperly influencing officials and doctors to push the drug.”

But we won’t feel too badly, because Janssen got off easy with this one. They don’t have to admit to any liability with the settlement, and Johnson & Johnson — who made billions off of the sale of Risperdal — will barely blink their corporate eyeballs as they make out the check.

Thomas Insel, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), has been writing some very interesting blog posts over the past month (this one, and this one).

The theme is that there are very few drug treatment innovations coming for mental disorders. He said that this is due to changes in focus and funding at the big drug makers. He also adds that there are very few new “targets” (areas of the brain for drugs to influence) for drug researchers to explore.

When I read this I couldn’t help but think back to something Dr. Morgan Sammons (Aliant University) describes as the “paradoxes” of drug treatment for psychiatric disorders.

A friend of mine went on vacation for just a few days the other week out-of-state. She called me in a panic.

“I forgot my meds!”

“I wish I could help you out. Have you tried calling your doctor?”

“I did, and I got this weird message about needing to unblock my phone, press *87 for a callback. That was hours ago, and still no call back!”

Hmm, no callback after hours?

So I offered to call her doctor for her on a landline, got right through, and got a real phone number that she was then able to use with little trouble. However, she still had to leave a message for the physician on call, and is still sitting there, waiting patiently for a callback that may or may not come.

It got me to wondering… Shouldn’t there be a more reliable system in place for people who are taking everyday medications, but forget them when they go away? Or, inadvertantly run out of them and get them through mail-order?

If you’re like some Americans today, you’re looking for a place to fill your prescription for generic medication used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Or your parent is, since most people who take ADHD medications are actually children and teenagers.

But the U.S. federal agency responsible for the shortage — the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) — couldn’t care less.

Even when requested by another agency — the U.S. Food and Drug Administration — to help relieve the shortage, the DEA just turned up their noses.

It’s no wonder voters get so sick of government interfering in their daily lives: One short-sighted federal agency tries to lessen an already minor problem — abuse of ADHD medications by a tiny minority of people — that ends up significantly impacting thousands of others unintentionally.

In a small clinical study published a few weeks ago, researchers didn’t find much difference between the three treatment groups of depressed subjects they studied — a group that received antidepressant medications, a group that received a specific type of not-commonly-practiced psychodynamic psychotherapy, and a group that received a sugar pill.

But there were some serious issues with this study from the onset, issues that call into question not only the generalizability of the results, but also their validity. It’s a shame that Reuters, who picked up on the study just yesterday, glossed over the methodology problems of the study, and instead just repeated the results as a shiny new established fact.

And easily lost in the discussion is the best result of them all — 16 weeks was all that was needed for most people in the study (who completed it) to find improvement in the symptoms of their depression, no matter what the treatment.

Let’s see what went wrong, and what the study actually tells us…

Back in August, we were proud to bring our readers and loyal viewers news of one of the benefits of Psych Central — our drug discount card. It can save you up to 80% or more off the cost of prescription medications, over-the-counter drugs and yes, even pet prescription drugs.

In October 2011, people who used our card saved over $500!

The Psych Central Drug Discount Card is accepted at over 60,000 pharmacies, including major chains such as Walmart, CVS, Walgreens, Rite Aid and at regional chains and local stores. It is offered in partnership with NeedyMeds.

Stress can throw anyone off-kilter. But when you have a mental illness, you might be extra vulnerable. “The demands, pressures and expectations of the holidays can be felt more intensely by people with mental illness,” according to Darlene Mininni, PhD, MPH, author of The Emotional Toolkit, who works privately with individuals and speaks nationally on topics related to emotional health and well-being.

“Having a mental illness is the same as having any chronic illness,” said Elvira G. Aletta, Ph.D, a clinical psychologist and founder of Explore What’s Next, a comprehensive psychotherapy practice. So it helps to have a plan and take good care of yourself.

Here are nine tips for coping with the holidays.

More and more people are exposed to psychiatric drugs earlier and earlier in their lives. Some professional associations now say children as young as 4 years old are old enough to start receiving medications — usually with little research demonstrating their long-term safety on a still-developing brain.

With so many people growing up medicated and on psychiatric medications, it seems like a good time to launch a blog that talks about the in’s and out’s of living a life medicated. I’m proud to introduce My Meds, My Self with Kaitlin Bell Barnett.

Kaitlin will discuss the experience of taking psychiatric meds, with a focus on long-term use, as opposed to people new to medication treatment altogether.

“In my experience, there’s lots of information available for people in the latter category to help them adjust to psychiatric drugs, but there’s very little for people who are supposed to be old hands at it.

This guest article from YourTango was written by Dr. Deb Schwarz Hirschhorn.

What a difference a few years makes.

“New Cures for Depression” shouted the 1986 essay in New Woman magazine; “Dramatic Progress against Depression,” blared a New York Times Magazine piece in 1990. Its subtitle was revealing: “The success of new drugs is prompting debate on their overuse—and the value of talk therapy.” That story smugly said that the new wave of antidepressants, including the then two-year old Prozac, which took the country by storm, had “proved to be as effective as the older ones and often safer.” What’s more, the article went on to say that these amazing new drugs worked when old-fashioned talk therapy didn’t. Psychotherapy was relegated to the dustbin of history.

Fast-forward just a couple of years. Suddenly, the manufacturer of Prozac, Eli Lilly, was being sued by families of people who either committed suicide or tried to do so while taking the drug. In the next 15 years, lawsuits for other antidepressants piled up against other manufacturers for the same reason: Forest Pharmaceuticals, maker of Celexa; Lilly (again), maker of Cymbalta; Pfizer, maker of Zoloft; and GlaxoSmith Kline, maker of Paxil.

As the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders continues to develop, there has been more and more reaction from professional groups with concerns. The most recent of these is an open letter that was sponsored by group of American Psychological Association divisions, and you can read it here: Open Letter to the DSM-5.

The biggest complaint here is that the DSM-5 development committee appears to have departed from the “atheoretical” approach that the past two version of have taken, in favor of a clear biomedical approach. The DSM-5 also seems to be changing the very definition of mental disorder by adding the criterion: ‘[A behavioral or psychological syndrome] that reflects an underlying psychobiological dysfunction.’

I’ve spent a lot of my time over the years writing about the importance of understanding your illness, learning all you can about possible treatments (including hearing about other people’s experiences), and becoming your own best advocate in your recovery. After all, who really knows you and your needs better than yourself?

But before you can begin advocating for yourself, you really have to understand the problem as you see it, what kinds of things happened in your life to bring you to where you are today (whether or not they are directly related to the problem), and figuring out where to go from here. Then you need to understand your treatment options, and how to get the type of treatment you want.

It’s not always easy, and sometimes it can be especially challenging to advocate for yourself when you’re in the throes of mental illness.