Blogs

Recently, Psychiatric Times spoke with author Susannah Cahalan about her recently published memoir, which explores a subject of vital importance to psychiatrists. At the height of her disease, nothing distinguished her from a person with schizoaffective disorder or schizophrenia—the only difference came later: when she was cured.

Newtown’s loss has finally forced us to look more deeply at violence and the treatment of mental illness within our society.

There are several reasons for taking the ketamine findings with a substantial grain of salt.

The Hippocratic phrase is: “As to diseases, try to help, or at least not harm.” By sacrificing science to “pragmatism,” all versions of DSM prevent the profession from identifying diseases, making it harder to help, and ensuring that harm will ensue.

In some expected and unexpected ways, the year 2012 seemed to be a watershed year for psychiatry.

In part 1 of this essay, I argued that panic attacks are nearly always pathological and disordered states, even when they occur in an understandable context. The issue of context and its relationship to disorderness extends well beyond panic attacks: it arises in nearly all psychiatric diagnoses not explicitly defined contextually.

Because panic attacks per se appear predictive of subsequent psychopathology, one proposal for DSM-5 is to rate panic attacks as a separate dimension of pathology, across all mental disorders.

With DSM-5 now approved by the APA Board of Trustees—and, to the dismay of this reader, all discussion removed from the DSM-5 Web site—how are we to evaluate the results of the field trials for the end product?

It has become clear over the last couple of days, that Newtown has become an area of great concern locally, nationally, and internationally. We as a world community need to go through a grieving process that includes this type of sharing, especially for parents out there. Here is a unique perspective from a parent whose young children survived the Sandy Hook tragedy.

What we know for sure is that for all the young children and adults who were killed in Newtown, their world ended a week ago. Soon after the tragedy, one of the fathers of a child killed tearfully pleaded for society to learn from what happened in order to prevent future mass murders. Here, recommendations from a psychiatrist.