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In continuing efforts to help the overwhelming number of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with PTSD, the US Army is using therapy dogs.

One cannot but be impressed at the ingenuity of our DSM-5 mavens at conjuring up new diagnostic syndromes.

Since the early twentieth century, when Alois Alzheimer and Emil Kraepelin constructed it as a unified clinical-pathological entity, Alzheimer’s disease has been both one of the most stable and one of the most problematic neuropsychiatric entities.

The basic problem is that the body is extremely complicated and most diseases don't arise from anything resembling simple genetic causes. We are the miraculous result of an exquisitely wrought DNA engineering that has to get trillions and trillions of steps just right. But any super-complicated system will have its occasional chaotic glitch.

What Every Psychiatrist Needs to Know to Be Prepared

Decreasing the Clinician’s Risk

Keys to diagnosis, assessment, and management.

As with all medical emergencies, psychiatric emergencies are among the most clinically challenging situations.

Is there growing evidence suggesting that paternal depression is associated with interpersonal problems with the mother and maternal depressive symptoms? Can severe psychiatric disturbances result from paraneoplastic disorders? Find out the answers to these questions in this week's quiz.

After years of war, more and more Iraquis are seeking medical care for trauma-induced mental illness. However, demand for such treatment far outpaces supply. In a country of 30 million people, only 100 psychiatrists are available to offer care.

Business groups and leading behavioral managed care companies have mounted a multifront attack on the new mental health parity law. The Paul Wellstone and Pete Domenici Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act (MHPAEA) went into effect on January 1, 2010, for employer plans starting after that date. However, companies have been awaiting a delayed final rule interpreting the terms of the MHPAEA.

I offer all of this as a way of describing how I became involved in intensive psychotherapeutic efforts with several adolescents who I then continued to see, often for many years following their inpatient experiences.

As many as 80% of patients who use herbal preparations and other natural products regard these therapies as the primary treatment of their ADHD symptoms.

Ultimately, Dr Ghaemi endorses a pluralistic approach and a “method-based psychiatry” in contrast to the eclecticism of the BPS. This method-based approach recognizes that one method may be more correct than others on the basis of empirical data and conceptual soundness (the “less is more” view), versus the BPS model, in which all methods can be equally correct (the “more is better” view).

I can still hear the click of clue tiles

It is rather difficult for me to avoid turning this greeting article into an homage to Dr Pies. My mirroring of his farewell piece2 with my title and preliminary quotes was meant to signify my great respect for him. How much I have learned and benefited from his wisdom, patience, knowledge, and compassion over the past 4 or so years cannot be measured.

Many Americans seem angry at President Obama’s seeming lack of anger over the BP fiasco. Frustration with the environmental calamity in the Gulf is perfectly understandable. Anger with those who should have foreseen and prevented this horrendous situation is also understandable, and-up to a point-quite justifiable.

A recent study reports that only a small fraction of substance abuse treatment facilities provide specialized services for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community, and that the majority of those are privately run.

Fads in psychiatric diagnosis come and go and have been with us as long as there has been psychiatry. The fads meet a deeply felt need to explain, or at least to label, what would otherwise be unexplainable human suffering and deviance.

According to physician recruiters Merritt Hawkins, result comparisons between 2006/2007 and 2009/2010 surveys reveal a 121% increase in requests for psychiatrists. And the US Bureau of Health Professions predicts a 100% rise in demand for psychiatrists by 2020.

It is probably self-evident that to be a celebrity doctor requires at the minimum certain characteristics. The doctor needs to be comfortable being an authority figure and, at the same time, convey humanistic concerns. Being telegenic helps if you are on television a lot.

The limited empirical research evidence supports the impression that practitioners, if they use the manuals at all, use them in a loose, informal manner and are comfortable ignoring diagnostic criteria and making their diagnoses following an informal prototypal pattern.

Why not define mental disorder just on the presence or absence of the characteristic cluster? Why was it felt to be necessary to also require distress or impairment?

Every month or so, someone (usually very smart and passionate) sends me a detailed proposal for a new diagnostic system offered as an alternative to the jumbled, pedestrian, atheoretical, and purely descriptive method used in DSM.

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From 19th century French impressionists to current-day “rockers,” it has always been a loosely held belief that creative genius encompasses (even embraces) substance use. But a recent study found that substance use impedes artistic creativity.