Dawdy over at Seattle's mental health blog Furious Seasons has been critical of Harvard child psychiatrist Joseph Biederman pretty much since he started his site, labeling him the leader of the "Harvard bipolar kid mafia." But even he didn't know Biederman was strong-arming pharmaceutical companies for dollars in exchange for moving "forward the commercial goals of J&J" (Johnson & Johnson being the makers of Risperdal, which Biederman was touting for use with children and adolescents).......

Seattle mental health blogger Philip Dawdy got some blogosphere blowback for a short piece he wrote mentioning David Foster Wallace's suicide. Dawdy's contention is that psych meds are falsely touted as failsafe lifesavers, when he estimates they work only 30 to 50 percent of the time, and of course come with substantial side effects. In response to commenters who accused him of going too far, in his criticism and in pulling in the shade of......

Psych Central, "the Internet's largest and oldest independent mental health network created and run by mental health professionals to provide reliable, trusted information and self-help support communities, for over 16 years," has named Philip Dawdy's Furious Seasons blog #1 in its Top Ten of 2008 list of bipolar blogs. Dawdy was actually #2 last year, so it's not a come-from-behind win, but the praise is warm indeed: "He’s an excellent journalist whose blog has become......

Yesterday we picked up on Seattle mental health blogger Philip Dawdy's post about the FDA boldly going where no medical body has gone before: approving two atypical antipsychotics for use in treating "pediatric bipolar disorder." The only problem is this disorder's existence is still controversial, let alone its treatment with drugs recommended for schizophrenia. It's not the FDA's job to innovate in medical treatments, but to regulate them. Today Dawdy drops the other shoe: the......

Seattle blogger Philip Dawdy, who covers mental health issues over at Furious Seasons, used to be a print journalist, and has won awards from the National Mental Health Association for his work. Maybe that's why he thought he could get the director of the FDA's psychiatry products division, Thomas Laughren, on the phone to explain why the FDA approved two drugs (Risperdal and Abilify, atypical antipsychotics) for the treatment of something called "pediatric bipolar disorder,"......

Running text ads on your blog never really struck us as the Get-Richest-Quickest path; we used to have Amazon ads on a book review blog and after a year or two and no checks, we decided we could better use the real estate and quit the program. A few months later we got our first and final check for...$6ish? But Seattle's Furious Seasons blog has just discovered firsthand the pain of algorithmic rejection. The email......

If you were here right now, you'd see us looking around suspiciously like we don't quite trust we're awake because we just read Knute Berger's latest deep thought over at Crosscut and we...agree with him.While promoting green consumption might be politically more palatable than getting people to change their habits and expectations, promoting consumption still offers an answer that doesn't solve the bigger problem. Global warming's hawks have to be honest with us: Fighting the......

In this corner, we have the accused, Amanda Knox, Seattle's girl-next-door and alleged participant in the murder of one. Google News hits: about 1,811. In the other corner, Risperdal aka risperidone, one of the most widely used anti-psychotics in the world, approved for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and marketed off-label for the "irritability" associated with autism, Asperger's, ADHD, and being teen-aged or elderly, and related to the deaths of at least 1,000 people (according the......

Yesterday the CDC released the news that one of the smallest subsets of people who kill themselves saw an 8% increase from 2003 to 2004.For all young people between ages 10 to 24, the suicide rate rose 8 percent from 2003 to 2004 -- the biggest single-year bump in 15 years -- in what one official called "a dramatic and huge increase." ... The biggest increase -- about 76 percent -- was in the suicide......

You probably don't read ex-Seattle Weekly reporter Philip Dawdy's blog Furious Seasons. That's ok. That's why we're here: to read every blog in existence and let you know when something interesting happens (which turns out to be rarely). Philip writes about clinical depression and the little cottage industry of humongous corporations that have grown up around that illness. It's a well-written and well-researched blog by a guy who's been working that beat for several years,......

Okay, it's not like we're going to upgrade to Vista in solidarity, but we did swell with a little hometown pride to read this about Bill Gates in this week's New Yorker: That afternoon, [Wolfowitz] took part in a panel on foreign aid with Bill Gates, whose philanthropic foundation has an endowment of $30.6 billion; William Easterly, an economist at New York University who is a well-known skeptic of development policy; and Ellen Johnson......

The other week we were talking about ex-Seattle Weekly reporter Philip Dawdy taking on Big Pharma on his blog Furious Seasons. Now he's hosting leaked internal Eli Lilly documents that seem to show Lilly...what's the best way...seriously misstating?...the side effects and permissible uses of Zyprexa, a drug used for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Lilly knew Zyprexa caused problems -- but Lilly somehow forgot to tell doctors all about it. Documents provided to The New......

Activist journalism is a shifting target -- yesterday's activism doesn't always apply. (You'd hope because it's been assimilated by the mainstream.) Here's the classic face of mental illness local media usually provides. But regular, conscientious reporting has got to focus more on the wealth of treatment modalities and medications "made available" to people who may or may not be able to judge between them. And how even doctors are snowed under by pharmaceutical data.......