E Fuller Torrey has a new book...

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/14/he...dpsychiatrists

Debating on whether to read this---on the one hand the cost will go to someone I rather dislike for his views on forced treatment on the other hand its always best to be informed of what is brewing in the minds of pdocs in this country---its also a broad platform designed to influence the minds of the public which could create problems maybe its better to check it out and come up with some sort of counterpoint? What do you guys think?

probably a good reason to read the book. i dont agree with fuller torrey tho.

I don't know if there are any patients who do agree with him---I mean I can only imagine his practice---sz is a devastating illness and now here are your meds for life---next...

I actually imagine that people who go to him are there because of their parents or something or because he is a big name. What confuses me is that I read his first book surviving sz and it was actually good and didn't have a lot of personal opinion in it--I thought that was very professional but in public he is so pushing a personal agenda toward forced treatment. Anyway I will probably find it hard to resist and read it eventually...such is my addiction to books on sz.

why do you have an addiction to book about sz?

Because its a problem I can't solve----none of it makes any sense and to me its a big scientific puzzle and I keep thinking I'll find the next critical clue either to the cause or the solution. I know there are people out there who are much smarter than me working on it but they don't exactly have the first hand experience to sort out some of the garbage. Like when I read the bitterest pills its written by a British psychiatrist who gives a lot of background on AP development and how horrible they are but she makes it seems like they might not work at all but they clearly do for a percentage of people so nothing is ever simple....

your smart but idk if there is any solution to this. idk im a pessimist. i just been through the ringer so many times that all i see is practically failure everywhere in this system.

Yeah I can't blame you for not seeing a solution---the key I think is that there is in fact not one solution but many---my current theory is that any psychosis is highly heterogeneous but being treated as a single condition. So take cancer for example----everybody is like when are we going to find the cure for cancer but there is no one cure, its different for every type of cancer, specifically tailored. Lets say you decide that cancer can be cured with mastectomy----yeah will that will take care of a percent and keep it from coming back but if you have colon cancer and get a mastectomy well that would just be stupid right----that's what I feel like the pdocs are doing now----they only have one treatment APs which is like mastectomy and they'll give it to you whether its specific to your subtype or not. You could be a man and they'd be like well we've found mastectomy works in like 25% of cancer cases so you're getting it (even though the incidence of breast cancer in men is very low but this is assuming no knowledge of that). I know it sounds stupid but that's what they are actually doing...because they don't know anything about psychosis subtypes yet. Anyway my current theory is some of the meds they've developed in the past probably work but only on specific subtypes so they don't do well in clinical trials but they may work if we start genetically screening for subtypes. So I think there is hope that there is some stuff that already made it to phase I or II trials might be able to be dusted off and tried again in a specific sub population of affected individuals. Part of the problem is it seems to be polygenic as well so even in one person its not like its any one particular gene and that makes the puzzle a lot harder---the type of math needed to figure this out might just be impossible I'm not sure---I wish I could talk some math dudes into looking at the GWAS data.