Thursday, January 13, 2005
Implementing Recovery-based Care: Tangible Guidance for SMHAs Page at the NASMHPD web site on an "e-Report" on recovery - "According to renowned researcher Courtenay Harding, Ph.D., recovery from mental illness has been researched and proven for decades, and she will cite ten studies from all over the globe as evidence (Harding, 2004). The irony is, as Harding will point out, you won’t find a section on recovery in the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. In fact, you won’t even find the word in the manual’s index. Only a small minority of graduate mental health programs features a recovery focus, and on the administrative side, the topic of recovery is often overlooked, misunderstood, or moved to the back burner in the face of competing priorities. Without any infrastructure for recovery-based mental health care, it’s no wonder that so many administrators and clinicians haven’t bought in to what is essentially a basic human right to feel better. In fact, just mentioning the word recovery seems to cause a stir depending on your training, beliefs, and role in the mental health rehabilitation system." See also the
table of contents of the articles included in the report.
Prestigious Research Journal Gets New Parents Psychiatry News story - "As of this month, the
Schizophrenia Bulletin has a new publisher. It will retain some of the characteristics that have been its strong suit and will add some new ones. One of the world's premier schizophrenia journals—the
Schizophrenia Bulletin—has changed hands. The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) has turned its publication over to the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center and Oxford University Press. NIMH announced last spring that it intended to stop publishing the Bulletin and that it was looking for a new publisher for it. The principal reason, NIMH Director Thomas Insel, M.D., indicated in a prepared statement, was to ease the journal's transition to an electronic format..." See also
About the NIMH Schizophrenia Bulletin at the NIMH web site.
Lilly Calls British Journal Story on Prozac False Reuters Health story at
Medscape - "Eli Lilly and Co. on Thursday branded as 'false and misleading' a
British Medical Journal article that said 'missing' Lilly documents linked its Prozac anti-depressant to suicide and violent behavior. Company officials said they have been unable to convince the influential journal to retract the allegations, despite Lilly's claim it years ago provided information from the documents to regulators or otherwise made the information public." "med"
Alliance for Taxpayer Access asks NIH who really owns publicly-funded medical research Alliance for Taxpayer Access press release at
EurekAlert - "In a letter sent Tuesday to National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director, Dr. Elias A. Zerhouni, the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, an informal coalition of stakeholders who support reforms that will make publicly funded biomedical research accessible to the public, expressed deep disappointment after NIH cancelled a planned briefing and announcement on new guidelines. No explanation was given for the cancellation of the announcement. Advocates had hoped the NIH plan would make peer-reviewed articles on taxpayer-funded research fully accessible and available online at no extra cost to the American public. In the long-awaited Enhanced Public Access Policy, NIH was expected to issue a call to action to each grant recipient to voluntarily submit her or his peer-reviewed scientific research results to
PubMed Central at the National Library of Medicine. By making this wealth of federally–funded research information available to spur innovation and improve health, NIH would work through its grantees to fulfill the 'research compact' that governs every grant of public funds by the agency."
Columbia study shows depression intensifies from one generation to the next Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons press release at
EurekAlert - "Nearly 60 percent of children whose parents and grandparents suffered from depression have a psychiatric disorder before they reach their early teens, according to a new study by researchers at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) and the New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI). This is more than double the number of children (approx. 28 percent) who develop such disorders with no family history of depression. The study, published in the January issue of the
Archives of General Psychiatry, is the first to follow three generations of high-risk families and has taken more than two decades to complete. The CUMC/NYSPI research team began studying 47 first generation family members in 1982; then interviewed 86 of their children several times as they grew into adulthood. The team has collected data from 161 members of the third generation, whose average age is 12."
New Health Affairs Focuses on Evidence-Based MedicineItem in the
Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, summarizing articles in the latest issue of
Health Affairs.
Abstracts of all the studies outlined are available online at the
Health Affairs web site at no cost, while full text of the articles is only available for a fee. Readers may be especially interested in "Evidence-Based Practice as Mental Health Policy: Three Controversies and a Caveat,""Evidence-Based Decision-Making: Global Evidence, Local Decisions" and "A Clinical Research Strategy To Support Shared Decision-Making."
Governor plans public forums on Medicaid reform (New Hampshire) AP story - "Following up on an earlier promise, Gov. John Lynch has set up his first public forum to discuss Medicaid reform. ... Lynch said he hopes to solicit new ideas for changing Medicaid as well as gather comment on the Department of Health and Human Services reform proposal known as GraniteCare. ... Health Commissioner John Stephen has called the current Medicaid system financially unsustainable. Stephen’s GraniteCare plan projects a 30-percent reduction in nursing home use in five years by providing more home- and community-based care. It also calls for individual budgets and 'more aggressive management' of mental health services and services to people with developmental disabilities."
