Psychiatric Times Vol 18 No 11

In this second article of a series, innovative research and technologies presented at the 41st Annual New Clinical Drug Evaluation Unit meeting are highlighted.

The very immediacy of the recent terrorist attacks makes the diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder problematic since there is no distance of time or space from the event itself. How can clinicians deal with this shift to best treat patients?

Source: Simons RC (1983)

Dr. Genova offers the antidote to the complexities of manualized and proceduralized psychotherapy that have arisen in imitation of procedural, technology-driven medicine. Supportive, directive and relational types of therapy and their correlation with various power structures within the doctor-patient relationship are described.

What was it like to be at "Ground Zero"? Three psychiatrists discuss their experience and the impact the attack on the World Trade Center will have on the future.

Given the recent anthrax scares, it is important for psychiatrists to be on the alert. However, this should be balanced with the realization that life must continue as normal as possible.

Since Sept. 11, health care professionals and their patients have been trying to make sense of the tragedy as well as cope with the possibility of future attacks. While the following list of books, articles, Web sites and so forth is certainly not exhaustive, it serves as a starting point of information sharing.

How the News Comes - Poetry of the Times

Over the past two decades, there has been considerable progress in understanding the functions of the prefrontal cortex of the brain and its regulation of mental activities that allow for self-control and goal-directed behaviors. These mental activities are unified under the term executive functions.

There is currently great controversy over the issue of obsessive-compulsive behaviors in schizophrenia. Are patients who display these behaviors suffering from a separate subtype of schizophrenia?

The introduction of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) into psychiatric nosology has brought about a great deal of insight as well as controversy. Have complex clinical manifestations of PTSD created a need for further clarification of the disorder?

In the glossary of our book The Culture-Bound Syndromes, Charles C. Hughes, Ph.D., listed almost 200 folk illnesses that have, at one time or another, been considered culture-bound syndromes (Simons and Hughes, 1986). Many have wonderfully exotic and evocative names: Arctic hysteria, amok, brain fag, windigo.