It seems like we're always bemoaning the lack of critical, patient-advocating mental health coverage locally, so we wanted to point out that Psychology Today has interviewed Seattle's Furious Seasons, and the result is a really illuminating summary of almost everything that investigative reporter Philip Dawdy has been up to the past few years, from critiques of the rates of bipolar and ADHD diagnosis in children, to uncovering pharmaceutical misdeeds ("the worst corporate behavior I have ever seen in my 15 years as a reporter") and the failure of FDA oversight and regulation. more ›

We've now "observed" two future of news media via Twitter (the City Club and ONA events) and watched the Seattle City Council and "No News Is Bad News" events go down via their live stream (while eyeing the #nnbn Twitter channel). One caveat before we recap: what we've learned is mostly useless in practical terms. more ›

[UPDATE: This post has been edited to reflect corrections made by David Dobbs to his original post, which we quoted below.] more ›

Seattle mental health blogger Philip Dawdy is less than impressed with the notion that CNN's Sanjay Gupta could be the nation's next doctor-in-chief. Says Dawdy, "As a reporter, Gupta strikes me as a lightweight outside of neuroscience and neurosurgery, who either gets his information straight from pharma companies and establishment doctors or is too incapable or incurious as a reporter to look for contrary information." And he offers as evidence Gupta claiming that there were no child suicides related to antidepressant use back in 2004. To Dawdy, who can think of four questionable cases prior to the broadcast, that's of a piece with Gupta's inability to see much wrong with Vioxx, which was later taken off the market. Vioxx-maker Merck would be hit by class action suits totaling just under $5 billion. more ›

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). This comes on the heels of NPR yanking the Infinite Mind show after host Fred Goodwin was revealed to have accepted pharmaceutical dollars without mentioning his conflict of interest. More, no doubt, to come. more ›

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 DFW, Dawdy responded with a post that sums up the mission of his site, ending with: "Besides, compared to Keith Olberman, Bill O'Reilly and Lou Dobbs I am a goddamned Zen Buddhist." [Arrested Development Narrator VO: "And that is how you close a post!"] more ›

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 synonymous with unrestrained investigative writing on bipolar disorder, mental health treatments and the pharma industry. He does not hesitate to call out BS when he finds it, and he digs for it harder than any other popular writer. Furious Seasons is an invaluable service to the mental health community." To think we knew him when. more ›

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 FDA's phone-shy psychiatry products chief, Thomas Laughren, "was deeply involved in helping 'America's Pharmaceutical Research Companies' design clinical trials for the disorder." How Bush administration of him. more ›

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. more ›

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... more ›

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 good fight isn't all economic upside. We're going to have to do more with less.

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... more ›

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 rate for 10- to 14-year-old girls.

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, so it's pretty popular in some circles. Mixed in with the reporting on anti-depression drugs is the occasional post on Dawdy's current state of affairs. That he's not currently fully-employed as a reporter, for example, is something that you might learn from his blog. That he has some concerns about the current state of the web and its effects on print journalism (and its effects on his current employment status) from time to time, is another thing you might learn. more ›

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 Sirleaf, a former bank official who is the President of Liberia. The discussion was held in a large auditorium, and every seat was taken. Gates and Easterly quickly got into an argument about the efficacy of aid programs. Easterly pointed out that research had failed to demonstrate any link between aid and economic growth. In the past forty-two years, he said, Africans have received five hundred and sixty-eight billion dollars in aid, yet there has been no appreciable improvement in their living standards. more ›

The other week we were talking about ex-Seattle Weekly reporter Philip Dawdy taking on Big Pharma on his blog Furious Seasons. more ›

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. more ›