Blogs

John Gartner's Blog

  • Has Psychiatry Been Corrupted Beyond Repair?

    Posted on September 15th, 2011

    We know that corporations can show few scruples in hiding the damage done by their products. Cigarette makers hid the link to lung cancer for decades. Energy companies and their political allies deny any link between burning fossil fuels and global warming. But no industry has been as systematic nor as successful as drug companies in infiltrating the knowledge base concerning their products.

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  • Malpractice Is the Standard of Care When Medicating Hypomanics

    Posted on July 14th, 2011

    "Above all do no harm." That's the Hippocratic Oath, the first commandment of medical ethics since 400 B.C. Yet, I believe, most psychiatrists are harming their hypomanic patients by overprescribing mood stabilizers and anti-psychotics that make them overweight, sedated, cognitively dulled and depressed.

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  • Charlie Sheen: Hypomania's Poster Boy

    Posted on March 24th, 2011

    "When they discuss hypomania on the Today Show, I'll know my work is done," I told a close colleague when my book, The Hypomanic Edge, was published in 2005. At that time, very few outside the mental health field had ever heard of hypomania, which is why so many people have asked me after the publication of the book if I invented the term, which of course I did not.

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  • Hypomanic Nation

    Posted on March 22nd, 2011
    America has the highest rates of bipolar disorder according to an eleven-nation NIMH study published in this month's Archives of General Psychiatry.

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  • The Peacemaker

    Posted on August 10th, 2009
    Former president Clinton, whose visit to North Korea won the freedom of two captured American journalists, may be the most prolific peacemaker of all time. His unique ability in this area is rooted in his psychology. Because he played the role of peacemaker in his troubled alcoholic family, it is a role he is driven to perform.

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  • The Amazing Emanuel Brothers

    Posted on August 4th, 2009

    Three brothers: a natural experiment in the nature and nurture of success. 

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  • America's undiplomatic top diplomat

    Posted on February 24th, 2009

    "Hillary Rodham Clinton's blunt and unadorned style of diplomacy has been evident throughout her first trip as secretary of state the past week in Asia.

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  • What to do with Bill?

    Posted on December 3rd, 2008
         It's stunning how fast Bill Clinton's stock plummeted - faster, it seemed, than the Dow Jones industrial average after the fall of Lehman Brothers. When Hillary Clinton launched her bid for the presidency, the question was: How would she deploy "the greatest politician in our generation"?

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  • How Will Obama Lead?

    Posted on November 11th, 2008
             This historic election is over, and now the question becomes how will Barack Obama lead? To understand how an Obama White House might be similar to or different from that of his immediate predecessors, Bush and Clinton, it pays to compare and contrast the three men on two components of their basic temperaments: curiosity and hypomania. Clinton was both hypomanic and curious.

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  • Palin is the one pallin' with extremists

    Posted on October 12th, 2008

    "Our opponent is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country," said Sarah Palin, referring to Obama's glancing association with William Ayers a reformed 1960s radical who served with Obama on a charity board. That hardly makes them pals.

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