Vol 30 No 6

When our jails become our largest public mental health facilities, we definitely have a problem-a problem we created-in how we respond to serious mental illness.

If your practice or your advocacy efforts place you anywhere near people encountering the mental health system for the first time, please have a look at this book.

Clinicians can feel confident in the evidence base when referring patients with a moderate level of treatment resistance for rTMS. Preliminary results suggest that deep rTMS may be an effective option in patients who have failed to respond to more than one antidepressant treatment.

In a new study, "as needed" use of an opioid antagonist for heightened alcohol craving appeared to reduce the number of heavy drinking days and total amount of alcohol consumed.

Results of a 10-week prospective study, recently reported at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry, offered no conclusive evidence about the mortality risk of elderly patients with Alzheimer disease who were treated with antipsychotics.

This article covers the spread of substance use problems in adolescents and some of the currently available scientifically proven behavioral treatments for these conditions.

Surprisingly, psychiatrists and psychiatric nurses “were just as likely” as their primary care counterparts to display negative biases toward individuals with schizophrenia seeking general medical care.

The rise in suicides and lethal overdoses of opioid analgesics is probably not coincidental. In most overdose deaths, we have no way of knowing with any degree of certainty whether they were accidental deaths or intentional suicides.

The aggregation of psychiatric diagnoses in individual psychiatric patients, ie, the presence of multiple disorders in one individual, is a curious and sometimes disturbing observation in psychiatry.

This article reviews some of the most recent findings in genetics and pharmacogenetics of schizophrenia-especially those with clinical implications.

Genetics seems to be a subject of particular interest for everyone. This article explores how the current state of knowledge regarding genetics might be used to help psychiatrists diagnose psychiatric disorders or predict their onset.

The major challenges for epigenetic therapies are target specificity of the drugs-an issue that is also true for most of the currently used drugs in medicine, especially in psychiatry.

Before I knew much psychiatry I met his angry stare in the ER, a homeless man with a three day beard...

Despite the prevalent perception that cognitive decline in the aged population is inevitable, researchers with Northwestern University's SuperAging Project are finding that "excellent memory capacity in late life is a biological possibility."

A panel of experts at the APA Annual Meeting discussed how changes in DSM-5 may affect clinical practice. Highlights here.

This psychiatrist has learned to ask if his Hmong patients have also consulted a shaman to help with their depressive symptoms and with their PTSD.

Two problems persist in the treatment of severe mental illness that constitute a barrier to effective patient-centered care: excessive reliance on a limited number of antipsychotic medications at the expense of other effective treatments, and the underutilization of other evidence-based treatment options.

Engaging in mindfulness activities either individually or with patients who come to us for brief medication visits can have a profound influence on the therapeutic process.

The art of living is the ability to use life’s inevitable traumas in some constructive fashion. This occurs on an odyssey that the resilient take that could be termed “the Journey of the Traumatized Hero.”

Sometimes viewed as “legal cocaine,” the over-the-counter status of synthetic cathinones (aka bath salts) gives the illusion that they are safe. In fact, they are highly toxic.

While it is true that the intense grief of bereavement and major depressive disorder often share some features-for example, tearfulness, insomnia, low mood, and decreased appetite-there are many substantive differences.

It is important for the inpatient psychiatrist to understand the perspective of the newly admitted patient. Many patients will find the experience depersonalizing, threatening, and socially alienating and may perceive it as a personal failure.