Crazy Meds’ General Bibliography

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Per HON Code principles 4 - Attribution - and 5 - Justifiability, this is why we think we know everything.

A lot of our information comes from direct personal experience, along with that of our friends’, and that of the many people who posted all the incarnations of the Crazy Meds forum, and to various online support groups - what’s known in the trade as anecdotal evidence. We also sit on our asses all day long and do a bunch of research. We find a study that is of interest and we put a link to it or an article about it within the page on the med in question. So there are many specific articles and studies that we’ve referenced throughout this site, either by direct link to the source or by quaint footnotes. However there are a few works that we’ve built upon as a foundation, and that we also reference to check on certain things. This isn’t a static list. Paper is by far the superior medium, expensive though it may be.

Here are the key books, papers, and sites that comprise the foundation of what we know about neuropsychopharmacology.

Stahl’s Essential Psychopharmacology: Neuroscientific Basis and Practical Applications (Essential Psychopharmacology Series) Third edition by Stephen M. Stahl © 2008 Published by Cambridge University Press.

Primer of Drug Action 12th edition by Robert M. Julien Ph.D, Claire D. Advokat, Joseph Comaty © 2011 Published by Worth Publishers.

The Prescriber’s Guide (Essential Psychopharmacology Series) Third edition by Stephen Stahl © 2009 Published by Cambridge University Press.

Clinical Handbook of Psychotropic Drugs 18th edition Adil S. Virani, K. Bezchlibnyk-Butler, J. Jeffries © 2009 Published by Hogrefe & Huber Publishers.

Mosby’s Drug Consult 2007 (Generic Prescription Physician’s Reference Book Series) © 2007 An imprint of Elsevier. Also the 2004 edition, but only on pages that haven’t been fully updated yet.

Evidence-based Psychopharmacology Dan Stein, Bernard Lerer, Stephen Stahl © 2005 Published by Cambridge University Press.

Instant Psychopharmacology 2nd Edition Ronald J. Diamond MD © 2002. Published by W.W. Norton

The Complete Guide to Psychiatric Drugs Edward Drummond, MD © 2000. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

PDR: Physicians’ Desk Reference 2010 64th edition back through to 53rd edition of 1999. Old copies of the PDR come in handy for PI sheets that are no longer available and difficult to find, as well as to track the changes in both indications and adverse effects.

The Bipolar Disorder Survival Guide David J. Miklowitz, Ph.D

Handbook of Affective Disorders edited by Eugene S. Paykel, MD FRCPsych

Living Well with Depression and Bipolar Disorder: What Your Doctor Doesn’t Tell You…That You Need to Know John McManamy

Clinical Neurology for Psychiatrists David Myland Kaufman MD © 2001 W.B. Saunders Company. An imprint of Elsevier

The New Chemotherapy in Mental Illness edited by Hirsch L. Gordon MD, Ph.D, FAPA © 1958 Philosophical Library, Inc. Published by Philosophical Library

Neurotransmitter.net Tons of information and research on psychiatric and neurological conditions, the drugs that treat them, and the rating scales used to measure the efficacy of said drugs. All neatly indexed and categorized to make it easy to make sense of a bunch of diverse information. I had no idea how much research was being done on hangovers until I hit this site. I knew doctors liked to party (considering that my stepfather is a vascular surgeon I had a first-hand look at how much doctors liked to party), but who knew they were getting grant money for it? A key site for patients, students and, most importantly, doctors of all stripes, shapes and sizes.

Sheldon Preskorn’s Applied Clinical Psychopharmacology Dr. Preskorn has authored over 300 scientific and professional articles, and many of them are available at this site, which is full of useful psychopharmacological data involving drug-drug interactions, methods of actions, clinical efficacies, pharmacokinetics and more. Dr. Preskorn has received continuous grant funding since 1978 for studies in the areas of psychopharmacology, neuroscience, and psychiatric illnesses.

PubMed You want studies, they got studies. Over 14 million citations covering 50 years of research. You’ll find the majority of my online cites reference a Pub Med URL. Especially helpful is PubMed Central, the repository of full-text articles and online books that are available free of charge. These are your tax dollars at work, people, make good use of them.

PLoS Medicine The Public Library of Science is another great repository of free, peer-reviewed articles.

The PDSP K_i database All K_i values, all the time. These are the raw numbers used to determine the potency of certain aspects of medications, such as neurotransmitter reuptake inhibition.

Genetic Basis of Drug Metabolism

Is low antiepileptic drug dose effective in long-term seizure-free patients? Tânia A.M.O. Cardoso; Fernando Cendes; Carlos A.M. Guerreiro Arquivos de Neuro-Psiquiatria vol.61 no.3A Sept. 2003

Monoamine depletion by reuptake inhibitors Marty Hinz; Alvin Stein; Thomas Uncini Drug, Healthcare and Patient Safety, October 2011 - Dove Press

And to give you an idea of what the Crazy Meds library looks like:

The Crazy Meds Library’s “top tier” books.

An older, clearer shot of the “second tier” books.

And a shot of some of the old medical texts I collect. That really battered one is a version of the PDR from the late 19^th century. You think your side effects are bad today? Little wonder why many epileptics chose the accepted the alternative therapy of the day: bland foods, lukewarm baths, isolation from society, and celibacy¹ instead of the available meds. Just like the ketogenic diet it supposedly worked better the younger one began. Now how many monks and nuns had religious visions?

Page created by: Jerod Poore. Date created: 31 January 2011 Last edited by:

Page design and explanatory material copyright © 2004 - 2012 Jerod Poore. All rights reserved.

Almost all of the material on this site is copyright © 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012 Jerod Poore. Except, of course, the PI sheets - those are the property of the drug companies who developed the drugs the sheets are about - and any documents that are written by other people which may be posted to this site will remain the property of the original authors. You cannot reproduce this page or any other material on this site outside of the boundaries of fair use copying without the express permission of the copyright holder. That’s usually me, so just ask first. That means if want to print out a few pages to take to your doctor, therapist, counselor, support group, non-understanding family members or something like that - then that’s OK to just do. Go for it! Please. As long as you include this copyright notice and the following disclaimer, I’m usually cool with it.

All rights reserved. No warranty is expressed or implied in this information. Consult one or more doctors and/or pharmacists before taking, or changing how you take any neurological and/or psychiatric medication. Your mileage may vary. What happened to us won’t necessarily happen to you.
The information on Crazy Meds pertains to and is intended for adults. While some information about children and adolescents is occasionally presented (e.g. US FDA approvals), pediatric-specific data such as dosages, side effects, off-label applications, etc. are rarely included in the articles on drugs or discussed on the forum. If you are looking for information regarding meds for children you’ll have to go somewhere else.
Know your sources!
Nobody on this site is a doctor, therapist, or a pharmacist. We don’t portray them either here or on TV. Only doctors can diagnose and treat an illness. Some doctors tend to get pissed off by patients who know too much about medications, so tread lightly when and where appropriate. Diagnosing yourself from a website is like defending yourself in court, you suddenly have a fool for a doctor. Don’t be a cyberchondriac, thinking you have every disease you see a website about, or that you’ll get every side effect from every medication¹. Self-prescribing is as dangerous as buying meds from fraudulent online pharmacies that promise you medications without prescriptions.
All information on this site has been obtained through our personal experience and the experiences family, friends, what people have reported on various reputable sites all over teh intergoogles, the medications’ product information / summary of product characteristic (PI/SPC) sheets, and from sources that are referenced throughout the site. As such the information presented here is not intended as a substitute for real medical advice from your real doctor, just a compliment to it. You should never, ever, replace what a real doctor tells you with something from a website on the Internet. The farthest you should ever take it is getting a second opinion from another real doctor. Educate yourself - always read the PI/SPC sheet or patient information leaflet (PIL) that comes with your medications and never ever throw them away.
Crazy Meds is not responsible for the content of sites we provide links to. We like them, or they’re paid advertisements, or they’re something else we think you should read to help you make an informed decision about a particular med. Sometimes they’re more than one of those things. But what’s on those sites is their business, not ours.
Very little information about visitors to this site is collected or saved. From time to time I look at search terms used and which pages they bring up in an effort to make the information I present more relevant. And the country of origin, just because I’m geeky like that. That’s about it. Depending on how you feel about Schrodinger, our privacy policy should either assuage or exacerbate your paranoia.
All brand names of the drugs listed in this site are the trademarks of the companies named on the PI/SPC sheet associated with the medication, sometimes on the pages about the drugs, even though those companies may have been acquired by other companies who may or may not be listed in this site by the time you read this. Or the rights to the drug were sold to another company. And any or all of the companies involved may have changed their names.
Crazy Meds is optimized for the browser you’re not using on the platform you wish you had. Between you and me, it all looks a lot cleaner using Firefox or Safari, which is what a plurality of visitors use. And I’m running Windows XP3. On a computer that sits on top of my desk. With a 23 inch monitor. Hey, at least you can make the text larger or smaller by clicking on the + or - buttons in the upper right hand corner. If you have Java enabled. Like 99% of the websites on the planet, Crazy Meds is hosted on domain running an open source operating system with a variety of open source applications, including the software used to display what you’ve been reading. As such Crazy Meds is not responsible for whatever weird shit your browser does or does not do when you read this site².
No neurologists, psychiatrists, therapists or pharmacists were harmed in the production of this website. Use only as directed. Void where prohibited. Contains nuts. Certain restrictions may apply. All data are subject to availability. Not available on all mobile devices or in all dimensions of reality.

‘Everything is true, nothing is permitted.’ - Jerod Poore

¹ While there are plenty of books to help you with hypochondria, for some reason there’s not much in the way of websites. Then again, staying off of the Internet is a large part of curing/managing the disorder.

² Have I mentioned how open source operating systems for commercial applications is one of the dumbest ideas in the history of dumb ideas?
[begin rant] I rent a dedicated server for Crazy Meds. It’s sitting on a rack somewhere in Southern California along with a bunch of other servers that other people have rented. The hardware is identical, but no two machines have exactly the same operating systems. I don’t even need to see what is on any of the others to know this. If somebody got their server at the exact same time, with the exact same features as I did, I’m confident that there would be noticeable differences in some aspects of the operating systems. So what does this mean? For one thing it means that no two computers in the same office of a single company have the same operating system, and the techs can spend hours figuring out what the fuck the problem could be based on that alone. It also means that application software like IP board that runs the forum here has to have so many fucking user-configurable bells and whistles that even when I read the manual I can’t find every setting, or every location that every flag needs to be set in order for a feature to run the way I want it to run. And in the real world it means you can get an MBA not only with an emphasis on resource planning, but with an emphasis on using SAP - a piece of software so complex there are now college programs on how to use it. You might think, “But don’t people learn how to use Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator in college?” Sure, in order to create stuff. And in a way you’re creating stuff with SAP. But do you get a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with an emphasis on Photoshop?
Back in the Big Iron Age the operating systems were proprietary, and every computer that took up an entire room with a raised floor and HVAC system, and had less storage and processing power than an iPhone, had the same operating system as every other one, give or take a release level. But when a company bought application software like SAP, they also got the source code, which was usually documented and written in a way to make it easy to modify the hell out of it. Why? Because accounting principles may be the same the world over, and tax laws the same across each country and state, but no two companies have the same format for their reports, invoices, purchase orders and so forth. Standards existed and were universally ignored. If something went wrong it went wrong the same way for everyone, and was easy to track down. People didn’t need to take a college course to learn how to use a piece of software.
I’m not against the open source concept entirely. Back then all the programmers read the same magazines, so we all had the same homebrew utilities. We even had the forerunner to QR Code to scan the longer source code. Software vendors and computer manufacturers sponsored conventions so we could, among other things, swap recipes for such add-ons and utilities. While those things would make our lives easier, they had nothing to do with critical functions of the operating system. Unless badly implemented they would rarely cause key application software to crash and burn. Whereas today, with open source everything, who the hell knows what could be responsible some part of a system failing. [/end rant]