Psychiatric Times Vol 26 No 11

Major depressive disorder is common during childbearing. Depression that interferes with function develops in an estimated 14.5% of pregnant women. Some statistics are troubling in that only 13.8% of pregnant women who screen positive for depression actually receive treatment.

Information transmission, such as blogs, RSS feeds, and podcasts, have emerged as common forms of communication. The exponential growth of medical knowledge and the increasingly rapid pace of scientific discovery have made it nearly impossible for the print medium to keep abreast of new developments.

With billions of dollars for electronic health record (EHR) technology purchases hanging in the balance, psychiatrists need to be paying attention to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) deliberations on the definition of “meaningful use.”

Hans Asperger considered the disorder a personality factor rather than a developmental issue. How things have changed.

Appetite regulation is made up of complex interlocking, incentive-driven motivational hormonal and neuronal circuitries . . . that can be pulled in many directions, especially where food is cheap and readily available.

The article “Mental Health Professionals in the ‘Enhanced’ Interrogation Room” on the cover of this issue provides an invaluable service. It documents psychologists’ and physicians’ involvement in enhanced interrogation programs.

Notwithstanding the personal implications and its centrality to mental health professionals, in my 30 years of teaching and writing about the intersection of psychiatry and law, I had managed to avoid that rite of passage. I was not comfortable and found it difficult to say something original on a topic that has been so extensively explored.

Patients who exaggerate, feign, or induce physical illness are a great challenge to their physicians. Trained to trust their patients’ self-reports, even competent and conscientious physicians can fall victim to these deceptions.

While violence is often portrayed in the media as related to persons with mental illnesses, there are limited research data to support this idea. This article reviews laws and obligations for mental health professionals.

You have read the blogs and seen the placards a dozen times: doctors prescribe too many “drugs” for too many patients. Psychiatrists, in particular, are popular targets of politically motivated language that seeks to conflate the words “medication” and “drug”-thereby tapping into the public’s understandable fears concerning “drug abuse” and its need to carry out a “War on Drugs.”

To Americans over 30, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter are buzzwords that lack much meaning. But to those born between 1982 and 2001-often referred to as “millennials” or “Generation Y”-they are a part of everyday life. For the uninitiated, these Web sites are used for social networking and communication. They are also places where individuals can post pictures and news about themselves and express their opinions on everything from music to movies to politics. Some sites, such as YouTube, allow individuals to post videos of themselves, often creating enough “buzz” to drive hundreds and even thousands of viewers; in some instances, these videos create instant media stars-such as the Obama imitator, Iman Crosson.

On Monday, August 24, 2009, in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) released a “Top Secret,” highly redacted May 7, 2004, report, Counterterrorism Detention and Interrogation Activities (September 2001 – October 2003).1 The report’s opening pages concede that the activity it divulges “diverges sharply from previous Agency policy and rules that govern interrogation.”