The risperidone-stroke link in dementia is one of the longest-running safety signals in geriatric psychiatry, anchoring the FDA’s 2005 black-box warning on atypical antipsychotic mortality. Popular framing reduces it to “antipsychotics cause stroke in dementia” — a true sentence that flattens a multi-axis decision. Choma’s 2025 analysis of UK primary care records is the largest …
SSRIs raise bleeding risk on their own. DOACs (direct oral anticoagulants — apixaban, rivaroxaban, dabigatran, edoxaban) raise it more. The intuitive worry is that combining them stacks the two effects. A new BJGP Open analysis from Chau and colleagues argues the stacking is smaller than most popular framings claim, and that the real safety question …
Lithium prescribing during pregnancy sits in a knot of competing risks. The teratogenicity data have been recalibrated dramatically since the 1970s, while the postpartum-relapse data have moved in the opposite direction. Most popular framing still treats lithium as a uniquely dangerous fetal exposure to be avoided when possible. The new Chauhan UK cohort shows what …
Ketamine and its S-enantiomer esketamine (sold as Spravato) are now established treatments for treatment-resistant depression and acute suicidality. The standard safety pitch from sponsors and clinics: at single sub-anesthetic doses, in supervised settings, addiction risk is minimal. A new case report in BJPsych Open documents a patient for whom that pitch failed catastrophically — and …
CBD has solid evidence for rare pediatric epilepsies, preliminary signal in anxiety and psychosis, and insufficient evidence for most conditions it’s marketed for.
Global age-standardized substance-use-disorder rates fell 16.9% from 1990–2021. High-income North America rose 24%—the divergence US coverage misses.
Alcohol’s effects on the brain, especially among the elderly, have long been a subject of scientific inquiry. A recent study from Gothenburg, Sweden, provides new insights into how varying levels of alcohol consumption impact brain structure in individuals aged 70 and over. This research sheds light on the relationship between alcohol intake and the aging …