Trauma in Psychiatric Practice

In this Special Report, the authors present an approach for identifying trauma exposure within a brief psychiatric evaluation and discuss proposed DSM-5 criteria for developmental trauma disorder in youths.

Here: how psychiatrists can be more responsive to issues of childhood trauma in adult patients--and why it is important to include questions about childhood trauma when obtaining a history of an adult patient with a stress disorder.

When attempting to incorporate resilience-building strategies into practice, it is worthwhile to note that resilience is a dynamic concept in which successful coping may mean a mixture of major real-life successes in the context of continuing difficulties.

Historically, there has been conflict between psychiatry and religion.

What place do the humanities have in psychiatry? One might as well ask: What place does the mind have in the brain?

Bringing the arts and humanities to psychiatry requires bringing these areas of study into our education, our research and our practice models.

Shakespeare's understanding of the human condition miraculously transcends his culture, time, and place.

Freud famously quipped: “The creative writer cannot evade the psychiatrist nor the psychiatrist the creative writer.” (Art credit shutterstock)

A list of recent articles highlighting the complexity of psychiatric and systemic illness, both in terms of overlapping clinical presentation and in the degrees to which systemic illness and psychiatric illness affect each other.

This article reviews the diagnostic criteria for both myalgic encephalomyelitis and fibromyalgia and describes how to differentiate them from depressive and anxiety disorders, the psychiatric conditions with which they are most often confused.

The diagnosis of depression in the context of diabetes and other chronic medical conditions can be challenging.

The goal of this article is to improve recognition of comorbid psychiatric and movement disorders and to help the reader formulate a management strategy using a multidisciplinary approach.

These articles illustrate the variety and complexity of problems associated with comorbidity in psychiatric disorder.

Unfortunately, the literature provides limited guidance on management of all cases of comorbidity. Careful diagnosis of BPD and comorbid disorders is the first step.

Migraine, particularly chronic migraine, as well as other chronic headaches, have high rates of comorbidity with mood and anxiety disorders.

This article aims to provide the general psychiatric community with an update on the major findings on the biology of ASDs as well as the advances in diagnostic and interventional strategies.

The 3 articles in this series discuss different aspects of the quandaries posed by modern communication technologies in the practice of psychiatry. More important, they provide guidance on how to navigate these largely uncharted waters.

Computerized information resources are being introduced into psychiatric practice settings, but some psychiatrists question whether they are really needed.

While this article highlights some of the modern-era risks to confidentiality that psychiatrists may experience, it does not constitute an exhaustive list of issues to consider and is not a substitute for legal advice.

In psychiatry, professional challenges are heightened by the importance of the psychiatrist-patient relationship.