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The article “Mental Health Professionals in the ‘Enhanced’ Interrogation Room” on the cover of this issue provides an invaluable service. It documents psychologists’ and physicians’ involvement in enhanced interrogation programs.

Notwithstanding the personal implications and its centrality to mental health professionals, in my 30 years of teaching and writing about the intersection of psychiatry and law, I had managed to avoid that rite of passage. I was not comfortable and found it difficult to say something original on a topic that has been so extensively explored.

Patients who exaggerate, feign, or induce physical illness are a great challenge to their physicians. Trained to trust their patients’ self-reports, even competent and conscientious physicians can fall victim to these deceptions.

While violence is often portrayed in the media as related to persons with mental illnesses, there are limited research data to support this idea. This article reviews laws and obligations for mental health professionals.

The press reported it in various ways-either as a “brutal gang rape” or, more forensically, as a “2½-hour assault” on the Richmond High School campus. Anyway you look at it, the horrendous attack on a 15-year old girl raises troubling questions for theologians, criminologists, and, of course, psychiatrists.

The editors of Psychiatric Times interview Vladimir Maletic, MD, PA, clinical professor of neuropsychiatry and behavioral science at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine, Columbia; founding member of the Integrative Neurobiology Educational Alliance; and member of the U.S. Psychiatric and Mental Health Congress 2009 advisory board.

You have read the blogs and seen the placards a dozen times: doctors prescribe too many “drugs” for too many patients. Psychiatrists, in particular, are popular targets of politically motivated language that seeks to conflate the words “medication” and “drug”-thereby tapping into the public’s understandable fears concerning “drug abuse” and its need to carry out a “War on Drugs.”

To Americans over 30, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter are buzzwords that lack much meaning. But to those born between 1982 and 2001-often referred to as “millennials” or “Generation Y”-they are a part of everyday life. For the uninitiated, these Web sites are used for social networking and communication. They are also places where individuals can post pictures and news about themselves and express their opinions on everything from music to movies to politics. Some sites, such as YouTube, allow individuals to post videos of themselves, often creating enough “buzz” to drive hundreds and even thousands of viewers; in some instances, these videos create instant media stars-such as the Obama imitator, Iman Crosson.

On Monday, August 24, 2009, in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) released a “Top Secret,” highly redacted May 7, 2004, report, Counterterrorism Detention and Interrogation Activities (September 2001 – October 2003).1 The report’s opening pages concede that the activity it divulges “diverges sharply from previous Agency policy and rules that govern interrogation.”

I read with interest the posts of Dr John Grohol, PsyD regarding my commentary, "Twitter and YouTube: Unanticipated Consequences of the Self-Esteem Movement.” I had hoped it would bring attention to this topic and am glad that this has opened up an important dialogue. However, the author has missed the point.

Respecting the article “Abortion Trauma Syndrome” by Arline Kaplan, I would note the irony of the claim that this syndrome is “conceived by anti-abortion activists to advance their cause,” given the obvious pro-abortion attitude of everyone associated with Kaplan’s article.

A stand-alone bill to permanently repeal Medicare’s “flawed” Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) formula failed to garner enough support in the Senate yesterday to surmount procedural barriers.

In planning a media workshop to present Glenn Gers’ independent film disFigured for the May 2009 American Psychiatric Association meeting in San Francisco, my co-presenters and I devoted special attention to the diagnosis and treatment of anorexia nervosa. (The content was originally prepared by Katherine Halmi, MD, and was presented at the workshop by James Mitchell, MD, when Dr Halmi was unable to attend.) The film deals with the problems of body image represented by opposite ends of the spectrum of eating disorders-obesity and anorexia.

The prevalence of depression in children and adolescents ranges from 2% to 8% in the general population, which indicates that depression in this population is a major public health concern.1-3 This is especially apparent when rates of depression are compared with other serious medical conditions in childhood, such as diabetes, which has a prevalence of 0.18%.4 The burden of depressive illness-including significant functional impairment in interpersonal relationships, school, and work-on the developing child has been well documented. Affected youths are frequently involved in the juvenile justice system.5-8 Furthermore, adolescents with depression are at increased risk for substance abuse, recurrent depression in adulthood, and attempted or completed suicide.3,9-15

In 2007, cancer was diagnosed in 10,400 children and adolescents under the age of 15 years.1 While cancer remains the second leading cause of death in children, increasing numbers of children with cancer are surviving into adulthood.2 Over the past 30 years, 5-year survival rates for children with cancer have significantly improved, from 59% in 1975 to 1977 to 80% in 1996 to 2004.3 Pediatric cancer, increasingly considered a chronic rather than an acute condition, is an intense emotional and physical experience for patients and their families.4

In August, the American Psychological Association Task Force on Appropriate Therapeutic Responses to Sexual Orientation released a report based on its systematic review of research on the effectiveness of sexual orientation change efforts.1

In the past few years, college mental health issues have received increasing attention by the mental health community, the public, administrators, and legislators. Events such as the death of MIT student Elizabeth Shin and the subsequent legal battle, and the series of suicides at NYU a few years ago received prominent media coverage.

It used to be that the answer to the above question was: “One . . . but he or she must really want to change.” Now that we are in the DSM process, many other things must be considered. We have watched as the Board assembled the Task Force and Work Groups for almost 2 years, choosing among expertise, years in the field, academic appointments, geographic distribution and freedom from excessive attachments to pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers, etc, to complete what appears to be a very scientific, secret recipe for “DSM stew.”

The FDA’s new rule on “expanded access programs” would allow pharmaceutical companies to give seriously ill patients broader access to investigational drugs outside of clinical trials. A limited number of expanded access programs were created in the past under sketchy FDA rules; the 2 new allied rules-one on the conditions drug companies must meet to create a program, the other on how they can charge for the drugs-ostensibly give pharma a wider berth. Moreover, psychotropic drugs can be provided under the clarified policy.

Those who know Sacha Baron Cohen will tell you he is nothing like Brüno or the other characters he impersonates. The third son of an orthodox Jewish family, he grew up in a suburb of London, went to fancy British schools, and spent a year living in Israel. He read history at Christ’s College, Cambridge, where an interest in the role of American Jews in the Civil Rights Movement led to his thesis on the 1964 murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in Mississippi. Not the biography of a man you would imagine inventing Ali G, an American ghetto rapper; or Borat, an anti-Semitic TV reporter from Kazakhstan; or Brüno, a gay Austrian fashionista who wants to be as famous as that other Austrian, Adolf Hitler. These characters have made Baron Cohen one of the preeminent icons of popular culture.

Anxiety disorders are one of the most common psychiatric disorders in children and adolescents, but they often go undetected or untreated. Identification and effective treatment of childhood anxiety disorders can decrease the negative impact of these disorders on academic and social functioning in youth and their persistence into adulthood.

Eating disorders are serious and potentially life-threatening, associated with severe food restriction, overexercise, malnutrition, and distorted thinking about body shape and weight or binge eating and purging behaviors.

What safeguards does Psychiatric Times build into its review policies to avoid conflicts of interest (COIs)? Do these policies apply to the “supplements” sometimes mailed out with the regular publication?

As the nation’s uninsured population climbs to 46.3 million and Congress grapples with health care reform, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) has intensified its efforts to advocate for a public health insurance option, insurance market reforms, changes in Medicare’s physician payment system, and preservation of parity for mental health.

There is no magic moment when it becomes clear the world needs a new DSM. The publication dates of previous DSMs were determined by revision dates of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD). Thus, DSM-I appeared with ICD-6 in 1952; DSM-II with ICD-8 in 1968; DSM-III with ICD-9 in 1980; and DSM-IV with ICD-10 in 1994.

A 43-year-old woman presented to the ED at 5:30 am on a weekday. While being triaged, she indicated she was hesitant to speak with anyone. The patient reported to the consulting psychologist that she had been deployed to Iraq as reservist nurse 2 years earlier. During that time, an unknown assailant whom she believed to be an Iraqi national working with military security forces sexually assaulted her. The veteran confided that she had been too embarrassed and ashamed to report the assault.

A 24-year-old veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) presents to the ED mid-morning on a weekday. While the veteran is waiting to be triaged, other patients alert staff that he appears to be talking to himself and pacing around the waiting room. A nurse tries to escort the veteran to an ED examination room. Multiple attempts by the ED staff and hospital police-several of whom are themselves OIF veterans-are unsuccessful in calming the patient or persuading him to enter a room.

A 29-year-old veteran came to the ED complaining of headaches and uncontrolled pain in his upper quadrant. He had been discharged from the military after he sustained a blast injury during duty as a Marine in Iraq. His right arm had been amputated.

Since the time of Homer, warriors have returned from battle with wounds both physical and psychological, and healers from priests to physicians have tried to relieve the pain of injured bodies and tormented minds.1 The soldier’s heartache of the American Civil War and the shell shock of World War I both describe the human toll of combat that since Vietnam has been clinically recognized as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).2 The veterans of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) and of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) share with their brothers and sisters in arms the high cost of war. As of August 2009, there have been 4333 confirmed deaths of US service men and women and 31,156 wounded in Iraq. As of this writing, 796 US soldiers have died in the fighting in Afghanistan.3