Demonstrating that the folks who are revising the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) are listening to the scientific data, they have nixed two new proposed diagnoses — anxiety-depressive syndrome and attenuated psychosis syndrome. The changes were announced this week at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, the organization largely responsible for updating the reference manual used by health and mental health professionals to make diagnoses.

The critics were worried that these new diagnoses would label millions of Americans with a mental disorder — and offering them subsequent treatment — that today wouldn’t qualify for such diagnosis or treatment.

For instance, while anxiety mixed with depression is actually quite commonly seen in the wild of clinical practices, there is no specific diagnosis for this mixed mood state. The DSM-5 sought to correct this problem — that clinicians are treating millions for a problem the DSM says doesn’t technically exist. But critics worried the new criteria were too lax and might result in over-diagnosis.

The same was true for attenuated psychosis syndrome. The proposed diagnosis was an effort to get children and young adults into treatment sooner for experiencing weird thoughts or hallucinations. But people worried that it would lead to unnecessary treatment of kids for a potentially temporary problem.

The evidence is in, and the death of NFL football player Junior Seau has been ruled a suicide. The speculation is that he suffered from depression as a result of the concussions he sustained as a pro football player in the U.S. Seau spent most of his football career as a San Diego Charger.

Many in the news media are portraying this as some sort of new news — that having your head repeatedly banged and bashed can cause long-lasting brain damage. Even with a padded helmet, there’s been a wealth of research demonstrating that head injuries still occur. The human head just wasn’t meant for years and years of such repeated abuse.

It’s also not the first time we’ve known of this link between football playing, concussions, and being at a much higher risk for depression (and even dementia). Perhaps this time the message will get through.

A year can’t go by now without some pundit, writer, or researcher weighing in on how the more technology infiltrates our lives, the lonelier we’ve become.

Stephen Marche, a novelist writing in the May 2012 Atlantic, weaves together a bunch of anecdotes to suggest that Facebook is making us lonelier.

Renowned MIT researcher Sherry Turkle, who bases her conclusions on an endless stream of in-vitro interviews with teens and young adults, suggested over the weekend in the New York Times that technology is certainly making us more connected… but those connections are more shallow and less rich that traditional face-to-face connections.

These are interesting observations, but are they offering us a false dichotomy? Or suggesting a causal relationship where none has yet been established?

It made the news this past week — researchers have found what they believe to be a blood test that may identify depression in teenagers. But some write-ups of the news got the importance of this possible test completely wrong.

Melissa Healy, writing for the LA Times, for instance, suggested in her opening sentence that, “Even among psychiatric disorders, depression is a difficult disease to diagnose.”

Nothing could be further from the truth. Depression is so easy to diagnose, in fact, that family doctors — who have no special training in psychiatric disorders — feel perfectly qualified to do it every day. You simply ask a person about 9 possible symptoms, and if they agree to 5 or more of them, and have felt that way longer than 2 weeks, they likely have depression.

In fact, it’s so easy to diagnose, we have an online 8 question depression quiz that research has shown can screen for depression nearly as accurately as a professional.

So what’s the real significance of this potential blood test for depression? And what unintended consequences might it have?

After a decade old legal battle, the Judge Rotenberg Center lost its effort to bar the public from viewing how “treatment” is administered at the facility. In this troubling, emotional video, we see then 18-year-old Andre McCollins repeatedly shocked 31 times. His crime? Failure to remove his jacket in a timely manner.

His family has brought a lawsuit against the Center, saying they never expected their teen to be tortured as a form of “treatment.” The Judge Rotenberg Center 8 years ago convinced a judge not to let the public see the video. But during a hearing today, Superior Court Judge Barbara Dortch-Okara refused to bar the local Fox television station from videotaping the recording.

Which means — for the first time ever — the public gets to see the “treatment” used by the Judge Rotenberg Center. I use that term loosely, because in almost any other setting or environment, most ordinary people would call this torture.

Click through to watch the video. But be warned — it is disturbing.

I’ve struggled to find something meaningful to say about the incident when the captain of a jetBlue flight suffered from what appeared to be a “nervous breakdown,” resulting in his eventual restraint and later, criminal charges. I think criminal charges are wholly unwarranted and an example of the double-standard and prejudice we hold against people with possible mental health issues. It shows a shocking lack of judgment on the part of the U.S. prosecutors who charged Captain Clayton Osbon. (After all, would they have charged him if he had suffered a stroke instead, which led to similar behavior? I think not.)

But outside of this prejudice shown by people who don’t treat a brain attack like a heart attack, there’s very little more to say about this unfortunate incident. No lives were lost.

And, in fact, no lives have ever been lost due to a U.S. pilot’s mental health issues, according to the Washington Post article.

Does having an abortion lead to a greater likelihood of having future mental health problems?

That’s what a study by Priscilla Coleman and her colleagues published in 2009 in the Journal of Psychiatric Research claimed. She said the data showed a direct, temporal relationship. In other words, after a woman had an abortion, they were more likely to report a serious mental health concern later in their life.

However, when other researchers (Steinberg & Finer, 2012) tried to replicate Coleman et al.’s findings, they could not do so. After conferring with the original authors and digging through the data a little more, they discovered the problem.

Coleman et al. had misrepresented a very important component of their original research. They never looked at a person’s recent or current psychiatric diagnosis. Instead, they had asked only about any diagnosis in their entire lifetime — something that meant they had no data about whether such a diagnosis was made before or after the abortion.

Last week, more than a few news agencies and blogs picked up the story that “one out of every 10 Wall Street employees is a psychopath.” This immediately caught my attention, because as a researcher, I found the statistic intriguing because it was so out of whack with the incidence of psychopathy in the general population.

But in trying to research where this statistic came from, I stumbled upon a symptom of what’s wrong with a lot of journalism today.

I can summarize the problem in one word — laziness. Many (most?) journalists nowadays take “experts” words for whatever claims they make, without ever bothering to check them out independently.

Although rare, school shootings like the one in Chardon, Ohio capture the horror imagination of every parent and teenager. And many people’s immediate reaction is, “Why would someone do that?”

The alleged shooter, TJ Lane, will now be psychoanalyzed from afar in the media, with various experts throwing in their two cents about his motivations and explaining his actions. Paula Mooney has provided initial fodder, by giving us TJ Lane’s Facebook page. “Experts” will try and piece together a portrait of TJ Lane with these kinds of bits and pieces of random, self-selected personal information.

I’ll try and refrain from any psychological analysis of TJ Lane, since as a professional, I’ve never met him or interviewed him. But I do want to discuss the school shooting in a broader context of whether there are any lessons here we can learn.

Are placebos — sugar pills — just as effective as antidepressant medications in the treatment of mild and moderate depression? That’s what a 60 Minutes piece last night tried to find out.

In discussing her reaction to discovering that the placebo effect may be more powerful than we previously knew in antidepressant research, CBS’s 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl says, “I walked away really confused.”

After viewing her piece, I walked away with the same reaction.

What’s an ordinary person supposed to gain from watching this segment, boiling down decades’ worth of antidepressant research and thousands of studies into less than 20 minutes? I’m not sure.

I grew up in Batavia, N.Y., about ten miles down the road from the small town of LeRoy. I had just gone off to Cornell a few months before the big train derailment in December, 1970, that spilled cyanide crystals and about 30,000 gallons of the solvent called tricholoroethene onto the railroad bed.

I never imagined that 40 years later, as a psychiatrist, I’d be reading about this incident in connection with one of the most mysterious mass outbreaks of neurological symptoms in recent memory. And yet, this past January, the environmental-activist-cum-movie-star, Erin Brockovich, began investigating a possible connection between that chemical spill and the bizarre outbreak among a group of LeRoy Junior-Senior High School students.

I truly don’t know what explains the strange constellation of signs and symptoms seen in this group of young people. I’m not sure anybody does. Most of the expert opinion has settled on the description of “mass psychogenic illness.”

As I was sitting around catching up on some mental health news on Saturday, I inadvertently stumbled upon another manufactured news cycle about the DSM 5. Considering no new significant research findings were released in the past week on the DSM-5 revision efforts, I was a little surprised.

This latest fake news cycle started on Thursday, apparently with the release of a Reuters news story from Kate Kelland. Kelland notes the newest concern comes from “Liverpool University’s Institute of Psychology at a briefing in London about widespread concerns over the manual.” There’s no link to the briefing. And I’m not sure what a “briefing” is — a press conference? (And since when is a press conference a news item? It’s not really equivalent to a new research study, is it?)

Kelland fails to note that Europe and the U.K. don’t actually use the DSM to diagnose mental disorders — it’s a U.S. reference manual for mental disorders diagnosis. So while it’s nice that some Europeans are expressing concern about this reference text, their concern isn’t exactly much relevant. Context is everything, and Reuters failed to provide any useful context in that article.

Sadly, Reuters is a brand name. And once you write an article under that brand name, it cascades down an entire news cycle. Let’s follow it for fun!