I recently experienced the odd coincidence of receiving 2 separate emails on the same morning each asking almost the very same question. . . how can I remain so high on psychiatry while at the same time being so critical of some of its recent trends and so fearful of the likely future harmful impact of DSM-5?
Hoarding has broad-reaching implications, including a substantial public health burden linked to occupational impairment, poor physical health, and demand for social services.
Doubt and confusion as to where ADHD fits into the general spectrum of illness further feeds the general perception that ADHD is a socially constructed disorder rather than a valid neurobiological disorder
Martin Whiteley is an MP who represents Perth in the Australian parliament. He has been actively involved in mental health issues and succeeded in a crusade to curb what had been Perth's alarming overdiagnosis and overmedication of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD).
I just received a very important email from Dr Dayle Jones who chairs the DSM-5 Task Force of the American Counseling Association (ACA). The ACA has provided a much needed wake-up call for the American Psychiatric Association.
In a decade-long study of antipsychotic prescribing for hospitalized children and adolescents, researchers found that antipsychotics were used in 44.3% of patients and were often prescribed for behavioral disorders, PTSD, and other anxiety disorders as well as psychotic disorders.
Deliberate self-harm (DSH) is a behavior in which a person commits an act with the purpose of physically harming himself or herself with or without a real intent of suicide.
The NIMH Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) project raises many questions about DSM-5 and future DSMs.
In cases of shared care, 90862 is often the only reimbursable CPT code available to the psychiatrist.
On January 24, Dr Ronald Pies posted a thoughtful piece titled “Who Can Forgive Jared Loughner?” which advocates the importance of relinquishing hatred in cases like the ones in Tucson and transforming “our revulsion and rage into something higher and nobler.”
Major mood disorders have been associated with increased suicidal behavior. This is especially true in patients with a mixed, manic-depressive, or dysphoric-agitated state.
Expansion of age-appropriate developmental psycho-therapeutic services must become a top public health priority to make these treatments more widely available to young children and to capture the potential greater benefit of the earliest possible intervention for mental disorders.
More than half of parents who have children with ADHD treat their child’s symptoms with vitamins, dietary changes, and expressive therapies-but only a small minority tell their doctor. More in this podcast.
Is ADHD in a child foreshadowed by ADHD in other family members? Have acute-phase treatments for major depression been found to be effective in children and teens? These questions and more in this quiz.
With the availability of drugs for ADHD and Alzheimer disease, more and more healthy people who have no mental health condition have been asking their psychiatrist to prescribe neuroenhancing medications in the hopes of improving their memory, cognitive focus, or attention span. What's an appropriate response when one of your patients asks for a prescription for a drug for this off-label purpose?
Which scales can help diagnose ADHD in adults? Are CT, PET, EEG, and MRI reliable diagnostic tools for ADHD? These questions and more in this week's quiz.
This table provides links to many valuable resources for child and adolescent psychiatry. A list of Web sites, books, organizations, and pivotal articles on ADHD and other topics.
Clinicians who treat children with ADHD face a challenging conundrum. Although our understanding of ADHD and its evidence-based treatments has increased significantly in recent years, the number of successful treatment outcomes has not.
Autism is demanding increased attention by professional and lay audiences; prevalence seems to be increasing. There are differing opinions about whether the increase is due to greater recognition and reporting, diagnostic expansion and substitution, or increasing acceptability.
This is both an exciting and challenging time to be a child and adolescent psychiatrist. New findings are changing our knowledge of childhood psychopathology. This Special Report discusses current developments in diagnosis, treatments, and problems for children and adolescents.
A 3-year study involving over 3,000 patients used motivational interviewing to counsel adolescents about staying away from potentially violent and alcohol-related situations. It was found that these brief sessions “reduced by half the chances that teenagers would experience peer violence or problems due to drinking.”
What's the annual nonfatal violent crime rate against Psychiatrists? How often is ADHD in adults correctly diagnosed? These questions and more from the July 2010 issue of Psychiatric Times.
The discipline of evolutionary psychology views modern human behaviors as products of natural selection that acted on the psychological traits of our ancestors. A subdiscipline, evolutionary psychiatry, tries to find evolutionary explanations for mental disorders.
Houston, we have a problem. There is a critical shortage of psychiatrists. And the problem is not in Houston alone-it includes the entire state of Texas, and every other state in the union (Mid-town Manhattan, Boston’s Beacon Hill, and Sacramento Street in San Francisco might be exceptions).
Adolescents with ADHD, conduct disorder, or who smoke cigarettes are less likely to finish high school on time and more likely to drop out altogether, researchers at the University of California, Davis, School of Medicine have found.
