Psychiatric Times Vol 28 No 4

The only question is whether Congress will cut the mental health block grant again, in 2012-and by how much.

In this column, we explore how the judicious use of neural stem cells (NSCs) has led to a research Holy Grail: the creation of research-ready, patient-specific neurons.

See if you can tell if the following quote comes from religious wisdom or a CBT therapist: “To defeat depression, you must introduce a fresh perspective to your thinking. You must begin to replace troubling, destructive thoughts with positive, constructive ones.” To this, we say, “Amen.”

Richard Berlin, M.D.: “There is something about the condensed pressure of poetry that feels very natural to me.”

The demand for security/privacy insurance is growing rapidly as health care practitioners realize that traditional insurance does not address privacy exposures.

Risk analysis is an ongoing process that should provide an organization with a detailed understanding of its risks and information necessary to address those risks in a timely manner, and the means to reduce associated risks to reasonable and appropriate levels.

Psychosis at any phase of the illness can be extremely distressing, disruptive, and potentially dangerous for patient and family.

If ketamine is able to turn off a patient’s depression, even for one day, you have accomplished something important, whether or not you can maintain it. This is because you have at least given the patient hope . . . that in itself is very significant from a therapeutic perspective.

The evidence-based approach to bipolar depression symptoms includes treatment with lithium, conventional unimodal antidepressants, lamotrigine, or divalproex.

Antidrug vaccines represent an exciting area of development in the pharmacological treatment of chemical dependency. In addition to the clinical trials being conducted on vaccines for cocaine and nicotine dependence, preclinical development of vaccines for methamphetamine and heroin is ongoing.

The focus of this Special Report is on some future-oriented aspects of psychopharmacology. First, it is an eclectic set of articles that cover treating resistant depression, using currently illegal drugs to treat psychiatric problems, and finally the potential of using vaccines to treat substance use disorders.

Mixed depression is defined as a major depressive episode (MDE) with concurrent manic or hypomanic symptoms that are insufficient in number for a patient to meet the criteria for mixed hypomania.

United Press International recently reported that construction workers in Hall, Austria have exhumed what may be turn out to be grim remains of the Third Reich’s Action T4 program that sought to exterminate mentally and physically disabled men women and children.

Following trends in medicine, psychiatry is faced with limited resources and third-party administration of resource allocation. This has affected psychiatric practice in many ways and altered the doc-tor-patient relationship. Trends toward resource-sensitive, third-party–related psychiatric practice may be accelerated by the current social concerns regarding the economy. Thus, an awareness of social context and the growing recognition that autonomy-enhancing alternatives to paternalistic care are fundamental to improve both the effectiveness and accessibility of care in limited-resource environments are each becoming vital for an informed clinical and risk-management practice perspective.1