Tag Archives: money

Sept 1: Grad student grant deadline for $2,500

Funding & Awards, News, ,

THEN/HiER, the first pan-Canadian organization devoted to promoting and improving history teaching and learning, will give up to $2,500 to support a collaborative project bringing together some of the multiple and varied constituencies involved in history education.

Our goal is to stimulate an active, participatory dialogue among these various communities of history educators, a dialogue that explores how best to improve history education in all its forms through more research-informed practice (from kindergarten to graduate school) and more practice-informed research.

Their aim is to fund knowledge mobilization and dissemination, rather than new research. The next deadline is September 1. (And, after that, November 1.)

Details regarding graduate student projects can be found here; regarding open small grants, which require matching funds or in-kind contributions, here.

Funding and Fellowship Opportunities

Funding & Awards,

Money TreeThe National Humanities Alliance has posted two news items that may be of interest to AHP readers.

Ph.D. candidates with approved dissertation topics, and recent Ph.D. graduates (within 5 years) who are looking to add social and political context to their historical projects, may find this Fellowship opportunity interesting: the National Archives is offering a summer research fellowship starting in July 2011. With an accompanying $10,000 stipend, this is an excellent opportunity for researchers and historians to gain access to these archives, to its staff, and to consultants from the House and Senate history offices.

Suggested research topics include: immigration policy, committee histories, environmental policy, Congressional investigations, or eighteenth and nineteenth century petitions to Congress. However, any topic using the historical records of Congress housed at the National Archives’ Centre for Legislative Archives will be considered. Follow this link for more information.

Secondly, The National Humanities Alliance has posted a list of funding opportunities for humanities and social science projects.

Of note are the Digging into Data challenge, where researchers create international (Canada, US, UK, Netherlands) teams to develop new means of searching through and analyzing the large amounts of data and databases now used by humanities and social science scholars.

American archivists may also be interested in this Publishing Historical Records Grant, which provides support for projects requiring between $20,000 and $4,000,000. The National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), which is a part of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), supports this opportunity to promote and preserve American documents “essential to understanding our democracy, history, and culture.”

Psychiatrists Stop Talking

General, News, , ,

The New York Times has run a piece about a historic turnabout in psychiatry: Most psychiatrists in the US do not offer talk therapy of any sort to their patients, but only medication. This will not come as news to most who are close to psychiatry or clinical psychology, but it is interesting that the main driving force behind this change is not an important shift in theory or evidence but, rather, simply cost.

Of the psychiatrist featured in the article, Donald Levin of Pennsylvania, the article says:

Dr. Levin, 68, first established a private practice in 1972, when talk therapy was in its heyday. Then, like many psychiatrists, he treated 50 to 60 patients in once- or twice-weekly talk-therapy sessions of 45 minutes each. Now, like many of his peers, he treats 1,200 people in mostly 15-minute visits for prescription adjustments that are sometimes months apart. Then, he knew his patients’ inner lives better than he knew his wife’s; now, he often cannot remember their names. Continue reading Psychiatrists Stop Talking →

Release of DSM-V Delayed

Books, General, News, ,

The American Psychiatric Association announced yesterday that the publication of the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) will be delayed until 2013. Although the APA’s press release (copied in full below) emphasizes coordination with the next edition of the European International Classification of Diseases, the development of the new edition of the DSM has been dogged with controversy about the insularity of the committee responsible for deciding which psychiatric conditions to include (see here, here, and here).  Inclusion in the DSM facilitates coverage by private insurance companies in the US, which in turn means a bonanza for the pharmaceutical companies holding the patents to treatments for those conditions. Lack of inclusion means lack of coverage for that condition, and corresponding lack of revenue for the relevant pharmaceutical companies. Billions of dollars are at stake.

The sudden announcement comes in the wake of a damning report on APA’s handling of the DSM-V process by American Scientist, and an editorial calling for a halt. Continue reading Release of DSM-V Delayed →

NY Review of Books on Physicians & Big Pharma

Blogs, Book Reviews, General, ,

I have written quite a lot recently on the stunning revelations that have come forth from Iowa Senator Charles Grassley’s hearings on the extraordinarily lucrative connections between pharmaceutical companies and a number of highly influential psychiatrists. Now Marcia Angell has published a piece in the New York Review of Books summarizing what has been learned so far, and looking forward to what is yet to be learned. Importantly, psychiatry is only one of the medical disciplines that have been “corrupted” (as she puts it) by Big Pharma. Angell writes: Continue reading NY Review of Books on Physicians & Big Pharma →

US Military Funds Social Science (again)

Conferences, General, ,

“Minerva” is the name of a project announced earlier this year by the once and future US Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, to have the Pentagon fund social science research in support of the American “War on Terror.” (Minerva was the ancient Roman goddess of wisdom. Hegel once pessimistically declared that “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.” That is, we only achieve wisdom once it is too late.) Continue reading US Military Funds Social Science (again) →

Psychiatrist Radio-Host Under Investigation

General, News, ,

Frederick K. GoodwinThe news just keeps getting worse for the American psychiatric community, a period in time that will, no doubt, go down in history as one of the darkest for the profession (which is why I keep writing about it in this blog). This time, it is Frederick K. Goodwin, host of the NPR radio show, “The Infinite Mind,” who is under investigation by the relentless US senator, Charles Grassley. According to the New York Times, the intrepid Republican from Iowa, who perhaps most famously exposed Emory University psychiatrist Charles Nemeroff for failing to report millions of dollars in payments from pharmaceutical companies (as reported here and here), has found that Goodwin, a one-time director of the National Institute of Mental Health and noted specialist on manic-depressive illness (now known as bipolar disorder), earned over a million dollars from Big Pharma without mentioning that fact on the show. He is said to have advanced, on his radio program, controversial psychiatric views that favored the interests of the very drug companies who paid him. Continue reading Psychiatrist Radio-Host Under Investigation →

Anti-psychotic Drugs, Kids, Gov’t (and Money)

General, , , ,

American psychiatry and government drug oversight bodies came under attack again this week when a panel of federal drug experts concluded that “powerful antipsychotic medicines are being used far too cavalierly in children, and federal drug regulators must do more to warn doctors of their substantial risks.”

The New York Times article about the panel’s report noted that:

More than 389,000 children and teenagers were treated last year with Risperdal, one of five popular medicines known as atypical antipsychotics. Of those patients, 240,000 were 12 or younger, according to data presented to the committee. In many cases, the drug was prescribed to treat attention deficit disorders. Continue reading Anti-psychotic Drugs, Kids, Gov’t (and Money) →

The Future of the DSM & $$$

Blogs, General, , ,

Mind Hacks has a good piece on the current negotiations over how much transparency there will be to the development of the forthcoming (May, 2012) 5th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-V) of the American Psychiatric Association. At stake is whether anyone apart from the DSM writing committee itself will know how much pressure is being brought to bear on the authors by pharmaceutical companies, which have a vested interest in diagnosable conditions being included in the Manual for which they claim to have specific treatments (i.e., billions of dollars are at stake). One of the major criticisms of the last edition of the DSM was that several of the authors had deep entanglements with major pharmaceutical companies, leading to questions about possible conflicts of interest.

Here is the official DSM-V website.

More on Psychiatrist’s Ties to Big Pharma

Blogs, General, News, ,

Charles B. NemeroffThe Atlanta Journal-Constitution has published a detailed report on Dr. Charles Nemeroff, the prominent Emory University psychiatrist whose close connections to pharmaceutical companies have led the U.S. Senate to investigate his activities.

U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, the ranking Republican on the Finance Committee, recently released documents indicating that Nemeroff earned millions of dollars from drug companies but reported little of that money to Emory, a possible violation of federal and university disclosure rules. Much of the money came from speeches, consulting fees and positions on boards.

Nemeroff generates such divided opinions that he has become the subject of a number of polarized descriptions: Continue reading More on Psychiatrist’s Ties to Big Pharma →