Psychiatric Times Vol 13 No 10

Mood disorders and their impact on women and their families was the topic of a half-day conference held at New York City's Algonquin Hotel;, former haunt of the famous-and depressed- writer Dorothy Parker, who made at least one suicide attempt there in the early 1900s.

"The Internet is like being in another world- you can pretend to be everything you ever wanted to be. There are no rules and no sense of time. In one hour you can tell each other all about yourselves. It's so interactive- question and answer and so quickly. No limits." Exhilaration was the expression of a 49-year-old divorced male gynecologist with the password "lady's doc."

The past decade witnessed major strides in our understanding and treatment of affective disorders in adults, children and adolescents. One of the baffling problems in child and adolescent psychiatry was the question of psychiatric illness spanning a lifetime. The existence of depressive disorders in prepubertal children has been generally recognized and acknowledged since the 1960s; however, only in the last decade did evidence become available that supports the notion that depression in different ages represents the same entity, albeit manifesting different clinical symptoms in each developmental period (Cytryn and others 1986).