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 ›

[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 ›

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 ›

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 ›

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 ›

Saturday we ran into Philip Dawdy sitting in front of Liberty. We were all blah blah affordable housing, blah blah CHHIP, but Dawdy was unimpressed. "What is that, 40 units?" he asked. "Why aren't you talking about what's happening with the Alaska Building?" more ›

Remember we posted about former Seattle Weeklyite Philip Dawdy's blogging on mad meds the other week? more ›

[Brewster] has enlisted two other Seattle Weekly veterans to work on the venture. 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 ›

He's not raking muck for any paper publications currently, but ex-Seattle Weekly all-star Philip Dawdy is still managing to rouse the rabble on the internet. He got noticed by Reddit.com this week after making the jump from reporting to editorializing and dissing Google, MySpace, "Web 2.0" and blogs from, uh, his blog. more ›

As an occasional Husky-watcher, we'll defer to Seattlest Seth on post-game analysis. But we can say that this was the single most boringly awful game we've ever seen at Husky Stadium. The Huskies assured us they weren't looking past the 0-9 Stanford Cardinal team. This afternoon, they looked past the entire football field. The talk show guys on the radio said they couldn't recall a more inept performance. It was like WWI trench warfare, with punters. more ›

Divey holes-in-the-wall continue to close or come up for sale with their owners shaking a yellowed fist at the smoking ban, but so far the public outcry against the 25' rule has been nonexistent. Philip Dawdy lets us know that at least one reporter is not going to let it die without a fight in the current Seattle Weekly. more ›