PsyDactic T. Ryan O'Leary

Send us a Text Message. -- Dr. O’Leary interviews forensic psychiatrist and author Dr. Michael Schirripa about his career as a forensic psychiatrist, the release of his first thriller, Mindhunt, and his podcast Mindhunting. Dr. Shirripa explores how his love of literature influenced his decision to pursue forensic psychiatry and ultimately resulted in his creation of an international thriller with an ambitious forensic psychiatrist as the main character. We explore top...

Send us a Text Message.- - In the world of psychotropic medication, the question is not just whether it works or not, but whether it works better than a placebo and whether the effect size is clinically significant and the benefits outweigh the risks. In the case of MDMA (aka molly or ecstasy), the effect size for improving post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms reported by researchers has been very large. Often it is found to be two to three times higher than is often found for ...

Send us a Text Message.The Narrative Fallacy describes our tendency to find meaning, connections, and causal relationships where they do not necessarily exist. In this episode, Dr. O'Leary had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Alexey Tolchinsky.He recently published a paper called “Narrative fallacy and other limitations of psychodynamic case formulation.” Dr. Tolchenski did not invent the idea of the Narrative Fallacy, but he is working to apply this idea to his own clinical pract...

Send us a Text Message.Dr. O'Leary discusses a variety of concerns that all clinicians should have in mind when using psychometrics. In the end, he hopes you come away with some level of agreement with the statement: “Our primary concern should not be with the quantity of data, but with the quality of the data.” Statistics are conceptual machines that will produce results no matter what you feed them. These results can be truly helpful and informative. But statis...

Send us a Text Message.In this episode, Dr. O'Leary discusses a word that he has struggled to understand since medical school. The word is aphasia. The root “phasia” comes from the Greek phanai which means “to speak.” When aphasia is used medically, it refers to an inability to speak, although not always. More generally it is often used to mean a failure to understand or produce language, but it gets complicated. Dr. O'Leary reviews the brain regions responsible ...

Send us a Text Message.I did not until recently even consider the cerebellum when thinking about psychiatric conditions, but the more I read, the more I wonder why the cerebellum is not considered a potential important player in nearly every psychiatric disorder. Although it can be said that all brain regions primarily function to make predictions, the cerebellum is especially active at refining impromptu predictions through short periods of time as sensory data changes to help us bette...