Notable Links

Recommended readings I encountered in recent weeks

#1. “Fixing the broken lovelies: As American cities deteriorate, a psychiatric nurse reckons with the high price of compassion” — in the Washington Post. This story vividly highlights how overwhelmed and under-resourced the US public mental health system is, while also offering an antidote to the romanticization of serious, persistent mental illness.

#2. “The helpful delusion: Evidence is growing that mental illness is more than dysfunction, with enormous implications for treatment” — Justin Garson for Aeon, a candid and thoughtful piece that makes a case for making room for madness-as-strategy in psychiatry.

#3. “Rosa Ritunnano: champion of phenomenology in psychiatry” profile in the Lancet of a friend who is doing great work in philosophy of psychiatry. Requires free registration to read the whole piece. “I think it's a dissatisfaction with sometimes oversimplistic approaches to psychopathology and dehumanising approaches that focus on the symptom as if it was an atomic entity…”

#4. Semaglutidonomics — Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten takes a look at the anti-obesity medication Semaglutide, and the possibility that we are about to enter an era of mass use of anti-obesity medications. “The history of medicine includes the following story many times: there’s some condition that doctors recommend lifestyle changes for. Then an exciting new medication comes out that treats the condition effectively. Over a generation or so, doctors go from demanding the lifestyle change, to gesturing at the lifestyle change before prescribing the medication, to mostly just prescribing the medication. We saw this with cholesterol and statins, with hypertension and ACE inhibitors, with depression and SSRIs. You can form your own opinion on whether this is good or bad, but we’re probably in the very beginning of this process with obesity. Opinions will be all over the map for a while before the inevitable pharma company victory makes everyone agree that semaglutide is first-line therapy.”