Category: psychiatry

The authors of a response to an article critiquing the use of the term “terminal anorexia” retracted their letter last month after receiving major backlash from researchers, healthcare providers, and people with eating disorders. 

“Regardless of inequities in care, terminal anorexia nervosa exists: a response to Sharpe et. al,” which defended the use of the term, was published May 20 in the Journal of Eating Disorders. 

The letter was a response to “Inaccessibility of care and inequitable conceptions of suffering: a collective response to the construction of “terminal” anorexia nervosa,” an article published earlier in the month in the same journal by researchers with lived experiences of eating disorders. The article outlined methodological problems with the criteria for diagnosis of a “terminal eating disorder” put forward in “Terminal anorexia nervosa: three cases and proposed clinical characteristics,” a previous paper by two of the authors of the response letter. 

The response was retracted on July 17. Its retraction note reads: 

Continue reading Outcry over ‘terminal anorexia’ response letter prompts retraction

Eric Ross was listening to a popular psychiatry podcast one day last spring when “some pretty remarkable” research findings caught his attention. 

A team of researchers in Egypt had shown that adding a cheap diabetes drug—metformin—to antidepressant therapy nearly doubled the treatment’s efficacy in people with moderate to severe depression. That meant the drug worked better than electric shock therapy,  an option when antidepressants fail. It was a breakthrough.

“I thought, you know, wow, this is something that I’m comfortable prescribing that could make a huge difference for my patients,” said Ross, who at the time was doing his residency in psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital.

But when he looked up the study, he discovered several oddities. For instance, the number of patients who experienced an adverse event differed by exactly one for 17 out of 18 single events like fatigue or bloating. That seemed unlikely to have occurred by chance. And all of the scores of statistical tests the authors had done turned out just the way they would have wanted, a dream that rarely comes true in biomedical sciences. 

Continue reading ‘I was fired up’: Psychiatrist effort prompts retraction of antidepressant treatment paper

Several psychiatry researchers have been unsuccessfully seeking distance from a dodgy journal with which they’re affiliated – and which has now published an article claiming homosexuality and masturbation deserve to be considered (or reconsidered, as the case may be) mental illnesses. 

The 2021 paper, “Review of Removing Homosexuality and Masturbation from the List of Sexual Dysfunctions in DSM,” was written by Sayed Ali Marashi, of the Department of Psychology at Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz, in Iran It appeared in Clinical Schizophrenia & Related Psychoses.

Oddly, the header text on the paper reads “Metallurgical Investigation of Tie Rod used for lifting Ferro-Alloy during Steel Making: A Safety Issues.”

According to the article: 

Continue reading Psych journal in revolt as it publishes paper saying masturbation and gay sex are harmful

In what the editor of a psychiatry journal says in an unusual case, the authors of a paper on treatments for depression have retracted it after being alerted to “inconsistencies” stemming from a change to their study design that the peer reviewers had requested. 

Here’s the retraction notice, in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease:

Continue reading Reviewers asked authors to change their study design. It apparently didn’t go well.

The journal for a religious medical group is retracting a paper that supported the discredited practice of conversion therapy for homosexuals over concerns about the statistical analyses — or lack thereof — in the research.

The paper, “Effects of therapy on religious men who have unwanted same-sex attraction,” was published last year in The Linacre Quarterly, the official journal of the Catholic Medical Association. (According to its website: “LQR explores issues at the interface of medicine and religion, focusing on bioethics and also exploring medical topics which have an ethical dimension.)

So, what were those effects? Pretty darn good, according to the article. Per the abstract:

Continue reading Catholic medical journal pulls paper on conversion therapy over statistical problems

Here’s a story that shows the lengths a public university — The University of Illinois at Chicago — went to block the release of information about a child psychiatry trial gone wrong, and how a reporter — Jodi S. Cohen of ProPublica — fought them effectively at every turn to reveal the truth.

Earlier this year, ProPublica “revealed that the National Institute of Mental Health ordered the university to repay $3.1 million in grant money it had received to fund [Mani] Pavuluri’s study.” This kind of clawback is very, very rare.

We tipped our hats to Cohen then, because we had been trying for years to obtain documents that would tell the full story of the Pavuluri case, which we had been covering since 2015 when a retraction appeared. In particular, we’ve been trying to get the university to release their report of the investigation into Pavuluri’s work. We have been making a push for such reports, as we noted earlier this week in a roundup of more than 16 of them. Continue reading A university went to great lengths to block the release of information about a trial gone wrong. A reporter fought them and revealed the truth.