The Week in Review: February 6-10

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This week, Psychiatric Times^TM covered a wide variety of psychiatric issues and industry updates, from the impact of patients’ overdose deaths on physicians to addressing America’s mental health crisis. Here are some highlights from the week.

Rx Evolution: An Ununified Model of MDD and Pharmacological Paradigms

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Despite persistent attempts to create a unified pathophysiological model of a unipolar major depressive episode, most experienced and sophisticated clinicians and researchers have concluded that depression is not a single entity.

Rather, depression is an emotional state with extensive heterogeneous factors that can either contribute to or protect against a depressive episode when a person is confronted with significant life stressors or biological perturbations. The coauthors Maletic and Raison provide an outstanding review of the wide-ranging factors that have been implicated in depression. Continue Reading

The Overdose Conundrum

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In this installment of Tales From the Clinic: The Art of Psychiatry, we visit the addiction clinic to discuss accidental overdose deaths. Although death by suicide is known to greatly affect psychiatrists, the impact of patients’ overdose deaths on physicians is not well studied.

Despite physicians’ best efforts in treatment, patients on medications for opioid use disorder may die of accidental opioid overdoses from having misestimated their current opioid tolerance or overdosing on other substances such as sedatives/hypnotics and stimulants. This article is dedicated to 3 patients lost in this past year—AK, EG, and AW—with heartfelt wishes to their families. Continue Reading

Herzl Spiro, MD: Mourning A Spiritual Founder and Leader of Community Psychiatry

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From a professional standpoint, I suppose a eulogy is not really necessary since I reviewed Herzl Spiro, MD’s important and revelatory memoir, among a few others of psychiatrists, on December 16, 2020: Disclosing Ourselves: A Review of 4 Psychiatrist Memoirs. It is definitely recommended if you have not read it yet.

Yet, from a personal perspective, it is necessary since he was a colleague, friend, and role model for me in the new field of community psychiatry, and we both lived in Milwaukee over recent decades. We worked together some, most memorably for me when we were dual discussants of a movie. I also knew of his empathy, sharing, and spirituality in providing effective psychotherapy, especially from a close friend who was greatly helped with the burnout blockages to his healing spirit. Continue Reading

America’s Mental Health Crisis: Are We Willing to Do What Is Required to Fix It?

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Every day, I wake up and go to work in a community-based, short-term care facility, where I provide psychiatric care to the most vulnerable members of our society. These are individuals with serious mental illnesses—most with unstable housing situations and a general lack of basic resources that most take for granted.

They cycle through homeless shelters, jails, and short-term care facilities, often multiple times within the same month. The prison system in the United States may be the largest provider of mental health treatment, but this was not by choice. Continue Reading

See more recent coverage from Psychiatric Times^TM here. And be sure to stay up-to-date by subscribing to the Psychiatric Times^TM E-newsletter.

Do you have a comment on any of these or other articles? Have a good idea for an article and want to write? Interested in sharing your perspectives? Write to us at PTeditor@mmhgroup.com.