A review of smartphone tools for suicide prevention and recommendations for clinicians.
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is one of the most common causes of morbidity and mortality, especially in young adults. Recognition and early accurate diagnosis of neurobehavioral TBI sequelae are important in reducing the severity of postinjury symptoms. Sequelae of TBI include cognitive impairments, personality changes, aggression, impulsivity, apathy, anxiety, depression, mania, and psychosis.
Neuroimaging is often used in clinical psychiatry to rule out medical and neurological conditions that can mimic psychiatric disease rather than for the diagnosis of specific psychiatric disorders.
How do meaning, memory, emotions and, especially, human suffering arise from the brain?
An interesting history, key myths, and the pros and cons of marijuana are explained in this book.
Autism is a highly prevalent, highly heterogeneous disorder of unknown etiology. Studies to clearly establish the efficacy of various classes of psychoactive drugs are scarce. Nonetheless, available findings do support the efficacy of atypical antipsychotics and antidepressants in treating the core symptoms of repetitive behavior.
Emerging research suggests that some individuals with particular types of substance use and abuse may be more likely to engage in suicidal behaviors. For example, those who use opiates, cocaine, or sedatives may have a noticeably higher risk of suicide than those who use other drugs.
Recent years have witnessed exciting developments in understanding and treating addictions. For example, it seems that almost weekly we get new insights into the neurobiology underlying vulnerability to addiction. Similarly, there have never been more medications available to treat the spectrum of addictive disorders, especially alcohol, nicotine, and opioid dependence. In addition, studies continue to underscore the crucial role of psychosocial treatments in recovery from addiction.
Adequate treatment of the underlying psychiatric illness consistently appears to be the most effective use of medication in suicidal patients.
In this review, we discuss the established medications as well as experimental therapeutic options that may emerge as future medications for alcohol intoxication, withdrawal, and/or long-term abstinence maintenance or harm-reduced drinking.
Three studies highlight sedentary behavior and memory, cognitive decline in psychosis, and risk of dementia with anticholinergic drugs.
Chronic infection with the hepatitis C virus (HCV) is frequently complicated by the presence of co-existing substance use disorders and mental illnesses. It is important to find improved ways to address barriers to care, and to provide effective and humane care to patients suffering from HCV infection.
A psychiatrist's chess game with his patient didn't go the way he expected.
Here we present how to assess safely patients who become oppositional or menacing in a clinic or office.
Jeffrey A. Lieberman, MD, and Mark Olfson, MD, speak from the epicenter of the COVID-19 disaster, New York City.
The public is gripped by fear of COVID-19 and by worry over whether the health system will be able to treat them or their loved ones should they become ill. Consequently, clinical and public health efforts have focused on acute medical care needs of those who are severely affected, while containing the virus’s spread in the population.
Research Review: Treating Major Depressive Disorder With MAOIs: Effect of Delivery System on Cardiovascular Events
Many barriers can prevent physicians who have a substance use disorder from obtaining the help they need. However, in many states, all is not lost for physicians who willingly participate in treatment. Here, signs, symptoms, and intervention steps.
The debate on physician-assisted suicide challenges medical ethics, emphasizing the role of doctors in providing care, not death, while navigating societal pressures.
Recent decades have seen an outpouring of publications about psychological trauma. With its formal diagnostic category of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Western psychiatric medicine has led the way in opening up this field of study. Many other disciplines of inquiry, including sociology, anthropology, legal studies, and literary studies, also have contributed their distinctive approaches and methodologies to the subject. Most recently, professional historians in Britain, Germany, Austria, Australia, Canada, and the United States have researched the origins of PTSD to great effect. These “new historical trauma studies” draw heavily on pioneering medical research from earlier places and periods. In addition, empirical findings from and analytical insights into humanity’s troubled, traumatic past provide ideas, observations, and insights that may be useful for mental health practitioners today.
All of the forces affecting and influencing my professional life thunder through my day like these footsteps on the bridge. So many times we hear that private practitioners are "dinosaurs" in today's managed health care environment. At times, I admit, I do feel like a hanger-on in some evolutionary cul-de-sac. Yet, as referrals keep coming in, I find myself feeling more and more fit to survive the Darwinian challenges facing psychiatry. Sharing daily life with colleagues I trust and respect better enables me to live with or ignore the "footsteps on the bridge," which in my more optimistic moments I imagine to be the sound of the real "dinosaurs" rumbling off into the mist.
Psychiatric disorders, such as primary sleep disturbances, depression, substance abuse, mania, sexually inappropriate behaviors, and psychosis, can complicate the care of patients with dementia.
Improving Medication Adherence: How to Talk with Patients About Their Medications, by Shawn Christopher Shea, is a slim and excellent primer on the verbal strategies and interviewing tips that clinicians can use to improve medication adherence.
Bipolar disorder screening scales have modest sensitivity; thus, a negative result does not preclude a clinical evaluation.
At the core of alcoholism is the pathologically increased motivation to consume alcohol at the expense of natural rewards with disregard for adverse consequences. naltrexone and acamprosate represent the first generation of modern pharmacotherapies that target this pathology.
What Skype does not offer is a means of communication clearly suitable for clinical services-especially in mental health and psychiatry.
The menopausal transition is characterized by sex hormone variability and a vulnerability to depressive symptoms and major depressive episodes. The rate of new-onset major depressive episodes is increased during the menopausal transition, as is the experience of depressive symptoms.
Recently our inpatient psychiatric unit moved into a brand new facility. In the months and weeks preceding “the move,” there was much preparation and nervous energy. We had been preparing our patients and ourselves for this day. “
Outpatient psychiatry is a critical experience in becoming an independent psychiatrist.