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).......

Traffic was snarled on Aurora for about two hours this morning, as police closed lanes to try to talk down a man threatening to jump from the Aurora Bridge. The P-I says he is in his mid-30s, fell 150 feet into a parking lot, and survived the fall. He was alive when taken to the hospital--probably Harborview, we imagine. This local blogger saw the traffic jam and wondered how hard it would be to justify......

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,"......

We're having kind of a difficult time even finding words for this one—maybe because our sister is also very pregnant and we've been awaiting news for weeks now of the baby's safe arrival. But, according to KOMO News: "A pregnant woman [in Kennewick] was stabbed multiple times in the chest and her nearly full-term baby was cut from her womb. A second woman has been arrested. The baby has been hospitalized in critical condition." The......

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......