Canadian Mindscape Monitor

Sorry, dearest readers, that we’ve been delinquent here at CMM lately getting posts up… We’re trying to get back on the job after binge-working on the aforementioned feature article about the rights of seniors in BC care homes. But we couldn’t let you miss today’s New York Times coverage of the latest on the lawsuit [...]

CMM editor Rob Wipond has just published an article in Focus magazine about the overlapping mental capacity and mental health laws which allow elderly people in British Columbia to easily and quickly be stripped of all their legal rights. Check out “Who Has the Right to Control Your Life?“

In response to the enormous public embarrassment they’ve suffered in the past when it was revealed how much more political and economic the whole process is than scientific, all the psychiatrists working on the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders have had to sign non-disclosure agreements about the process, according [...]

The Canadian Press is reporting that the Association of Faculties of Medicine of Canada is “endorsing the principles” of a April 2008 report from the Association of American Medical Colleges which recommended cutting off the stream of kickbacks and perks like free pizza parties, refrigerators and sunbelt trips being given to med students by pharmaceutical [...]

We here at CMM have been worrying that we might one day see striking workers and protesters rounded up, declared mentally ill and forcibly sedated en masse, but it seems that day has already arrived and psychiatrist Dr. Lyle Rossiter has gone much further than our worst nightmares. We thought it was actually a viral [...]

U.S. National Public Radio has finally fired its psychiatrist talkshow host, Dr.  Frederick Goodwin of “The Infinite Mind”. The New York Times reports he potted $1.3 million in kickbacks from pharmaceutical companies — much more than NPR ever paid him to host the show no doubt — during his 7-year tenure. “The fact that he [...]

An excellent overview in the New York Times discusses Senator Charles Grassley’s ongoing investigations into the huge amounts of money many high level, influential, widely respected psychiatrists and other medical doctors receive from drug companies. It’s a long overdue expose that’s making it clear that universities have been unable or unwilling to police conflicts of [...]

The law firm of Rochon Genova LLP has launched a class action suit against Toronto psychiatrist Dr. Eddie Kingstone, on behalf of patients who were “negligently” drugged by him in ways that, they say, “he knew or ought to have known would lead to drug dependency and addiction”. The preceding Ontario College of Physicians and [...]

A new article in the British Journal of Psychiatry argues that psychiatrists are already helping to improve people’s “moral character” with their drugs, not just their mental health, and therefore should embrace this role. The Wired Science blog discusses the topic with stunning obliviousness to the horrors underlying the real question being asked: Since many [...]

“The Pill Pushers” a terrific article by Alex Roslin has appeared this week in Vancouver, BC’s Georgia Straight newsweekly. The centre-piece is an interview with a former Eli Lilly sales rep, who describes how he was trained to pitch doctors to prescribe certain drugs, downplay deadly side effects and inappropriate uses, and slowly condition doctors [...]