Neuroskeptic Latest Blog Posts

Do countries with more mental illness have more suicides? At first glance, it seems as though the answer must be "yes". Although not all suicides are related to mental illness, unsurprisingly people with mental illness do have a much higher suicide rate than people without. So, all other ...

An intriguing and tragic story of brain damage is reported in the latest issue of Neurocase : Klüver-Bucy syndrome, hypersexuality, and the law . The authors are Devinsky, Sacks, and Devinsky - Sacks being neurologist and author Dr. Oliver Sacks . Their anonymous patient, a 51 year old ...

Today I was going to blog this paper , which says that you can predict which kids will grow up and be criminals by measuring their Pavlovian fear conditioning at age 8. In Mauritius. But The Last Psychiatrist already said everything I was going to. Luckily, there's another article in the ...

The BBC have run a profile of a Chinese rock band who've been banned from the radio for criticizing the government. How sad, we think. But we're not very surprised. We all know that the authoritarian Chinese regime doesn't respect human rights and civil liberties. Naturally they would want to ...

It's every man's dream - a pill to make women want more sex. According to Boehringer Pharmaceuticals , that dream could be a reality in a few years, in the form of the strangely-named flibanserin . But is it the latest wonder-drug or just a glorified sleeping pill? Read on. Flibanserin was ...

We all know about movies that are so bad, they're good . But could the same thing apply to doctors? As I described last week , Jennings is a young woman from Virginia who developed horrible symptoms, including muscle spasms and convulsions, after getting a flu vaccine. It looked a bit like a ...

Previously I wrote about a small study finding that smoked marijuana helps with HIV-related pain. In the last month, two more clinical trials of medical marijuana - or rather, marijuana-based drugs - for pain have come out. First, the good news. Johnson et al tested a mouth spray containing ...

Jamie Talan's Deep Brain Stimulation: A New Treatment Shows Promise In The Most Difficult Cases is the first book to offer a popular look at DBS , one of the more exciting emerging treatments in neurology and psychiatry. Deep Brain Stimulation is not a textbook and the depth of scientific ...

You may already have heard about Desiree Jennings . If not, here's a summary, although for the full story you should consult Steven Novella or Orac , whose expert analyses of the case are second to none. Desiree Jennings is a 25 year old woman from Ashburn, Virginia who developed horrible ...

It's always nice when a local boy makes good in the big wide world. Many British neuroscientists and psychiatrists have been feeling rather proud this week following the enormous amount of attention given to Professor David Nutt, formerly the British government's chief adviser on illegal ...

The BBC asks - " Why are fat people abused ? Why is "fattism" seen by many as an acceptable prejudice?" Psychoanalyst Susie Orbach explains or tries to: Often the assumption is that overweight people have lost their self-control. That frightens society because there is so much ...