April 7th 2025
Female offenders in the criminal justice system are more likely to have experienced trauma and are more likely to be diagnosed with conditions such as PTSD and depression compared with male offenders.
Expert Perspectives in the Recognition and Management of Postpartum Depression
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Southern California Psychiatry Conference
July 11-12, 2025
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SimulatED™: Diagnosing and Treating Alzheimer’s Disease in the Modern Era
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Expert Illustrations & Commentaries™: New Targets for Treatment in Cognitive Impairment in Schizophrenia – The Role of NMDA Receptors and Co-agonists
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BURST CME™ Part I: Understanding the Impact of Huntington’s Disease
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Burst CME™ Part II: The Evolving Treatment Landscape for Huntington Disease
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Clinical ShowCase: Developing a Personalized Treatment Plan for a Patient with Huntington’s Disease Associated Chorea
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Community Practice Connections™: Optimizing the Management of Tardive Dyskinesia—Addressing the Complexity of Care With Targeted Treatment
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PER Psych Summit: Integrating Shared Decision-Making Into Management Plans for Patients With Schizophrenia
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Southern Florida Psychiatry Conference
November 21-22, 2025
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Managing Negative Symptoms of Schizophrenia: Can Prescription Digital Therapeutics Make an Impact?
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Optimizing Care for Patients With Tardive Dyskinesia
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Stabilize and Thrive: Prioritizing Patient Success Through Novel Therapeutic Management in Schizophrenia
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Anxiety and Depression in a Psychiatrically Informed Pain Medicine Practice
December 1st 2007Patients with chronic pain and head injury frequently have comorbid anxiety and depressive disorders, with depressive disorders appearing to be more predominant. A number of studies show that depressive spectrum illness develops in 40% to 80% of patients with chronic pain; in a majority of these cases, the mood disorder is caused by chronic pain.
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Most estimates suggest that there are just over a million persons living with HIV/AIDS in the United States. According to CDC data, between 2001 and 2005, an average of 37,127 new cases of HIV infection, HIV infection and later AIDS, and concurrent HIV infection and AIDS were diagnosed each year.
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The Conundrum of Psychiatric Comorbidity
December 1st 2007Since the revision of DSM-III, high rates of co-occurring psychiatric disorders have been observed, particularly in cases of moderate and severe psychiatric illness. The reason lies in the design of the diagnostic system itself: DSM-IV is a descriptive, categorical system that splits psychiatric behaviors and symptoms into numerous distinct disorders, and uses few exclusionary hierarchies to eliminate multiple diagnoses.
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Illinois to Implement New Mental Illness Treatment Law
November 1st 2007In September, Gov Rod Blagojevich (D, Ill) signed Senate Bill 234 into law, allowing early state intervention for persons with severe mental illnesses. Before this enactment, the state required that persons must be a danger to themselves or others before court-ordered treatment could take place.
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Strategies Against Methamphetamine and Cocaine Described at ASAM Meeting
November 1st 2007Widespread media reports and billboard campaigns decrying a methamphetamine epidemic are drawing attention away from the greater and more entrenched use of cocaine, according to a National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) scientist speaking at the American Society of Addiction Medicine's (ASAM) 38th Annual Medical-Scientific Conference, held in Miami, April 26 to 29.
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Perceptions of Threat and the Video Game From Hell
November 1st 2007Of the many bits of wisdom my parents shared with me as a teenager, one stands out as particularly useful: "John, 90% of the things you worry about will never happen to you!" I still think about this comforting observation from time to time, especially now that I have my own children, and I furrow my brow because I wonder how they--or anybody else--could come up with such an optimistic statistic.
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Computer Gaming--When Virtual Violence Becomes Real
November 1st 2007Virtual games, such as World of Warcraft, The Sims, and Second Life, are played by thousands every day, allowing people, worldwide, to connect and share information. In fact, the virtual "worlds" that can be created in these games are now being used to make money (through buying and selling virtual objects), to form partnerships and friendships, and even to conduct business; it is easy to see how many become engrossed in this alternative life.
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Psychiatric Emergencies in Bipolar and Related Disorders
November 1st 2007Part 1 of this article, discussed a general approach to treating psychiatric emergencies in patients with bipolar and related disorders, as well as the assessment and management of agitation and impulsive aggression. Part 2 focuses on psychosis, suicidality, and specific treatments relevant to patients in emergency settings who are agitated or have bipolar disorder.
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Many of the things that we busy ourselves with have no apparent utility. Blogging, playing games, and collecting come to mind. To declare that we are compelled to do these things may be too strong, but we do pursue these activities with little deliberation and without concern as to their usefulness. The ubiquity of these pursuits suggests that these activities or their variants helped humans survive at some point and that they now rest on innate brain programs.
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Marijuana Use, Withdrawal, and Craving in Adolescents
November 1st 2007Marijuana is the most commonly used illicit drug in the United States and worldwide. Initiation of use typically occurs during adolescence. The most recent epidemiological data indicate that in the United States, 42% of high school seniors have tried marijuana, 18% have used it in the past 30 days, and 5% use it daily.
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The Intersection of Mental Health and Successful Aging
November 1st 2007One consequence of the "graying" of the world's population is that psychiatrists, along with all health care professionals, will increasingly be providing services to older adults. In the United States, the first set of people belonging to the baby boom generation turned 60 in 2005, and the number of people older than 60 will soonoutnumber children for the first time in recorded history.
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Neurological Complications of Perinatal Asphyxia
November 1st 2007The degree of asphyxia is best ascertained by measuring the amount of fetal acidosis determined by umbilical arterial blood. An umbilical arterial pH of less than 7.0 is seen in about 0.3% of deliveries.1 It indicates a severity of acidosis that places the fetus at risk for permanent neurological damage because of asphyxia. However, the outcome of infants with umbilical cord pH of less than 7.0 who required neonatal intensive care is relatively good. Eighty-one percent can be expected have a normal examination at discharge.
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All of us have heard the phrase "between a rock and a hard place," and many of us have been in the situation that the idiom describes. However, few of us (other than English professors) likely know the origin of the saying and even fewer of us know how it applies to clinical psychiatry. Delving into these seemingly unrelated queries will be the subject of this month's column.
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Treatment Resistance in Youths With ADHD and Comorbid Conditions
October 1st 2007Since its introduction in DSM-III in 1980, attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has proved to be a developmental disorder with many causes and complex behavioral, cognitive, and emotional manifestations that can impair academic functioning, occupational achievement, social relationships, and self-esteem.
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SSRI Prescribing Rates and Adolescent Suicide: Is the Black Box Hurting or Helping?
October 1st 2007Suicide is the third leading cause of death in younger (10- to 14-year-old) adolescents in the United States and the leading cause of death in this age group in other countries, including China, Sweden, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand.
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NAMI Programs Educate Families of Mentally Ill
October 1st 2007In 20 years of dealing with severe schizophrenia in her sister and daughter, it occurred to psychologist Joyce Burland, PhD, that she "had never been given any instruction on how to be helpful to them," so in 1991, she wrote up a highly structured course with a standardized curriculum and training guide.
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Perspectives on Consultation-Liaison in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
October 1st 2007Child and adolescent psychosomatic medicine, usually in the realm of the pediatric psychiatric consultation-liaison service, seeks to address the complex relationship between a child's physical illness and affective state with the goal of improving the child's emotional well-being.
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Psychiatric Naturalism and the Dimensions of Freedom: Implications for Psychiatry and the Law
October 1st 2007In part 1 of this essay, I argued that individual freedom is not only compatible with determinism but dependent on it. I also argued that freedom is not an "either/or" condition. Rather, actions may be more or less free, and therefore, more or less "responsible," depending on a number of contingent factors, yielding various degrees of freedom. Psychiatrists, I suggested, can be most helpful in so far as we can describe, study, and categorize these degrees of freedom and the psychopathological conditions that undermine them. In part 2, I elaborate on the "naturalistic" model of freedom and autonomy and suggest how it may be applied to psychiatric disorders and medico-legal determinations of culpability.
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