Psychiatric Times Vol 27 No 6

At the end of life, psychiatrists are often asked to assess a patient’s capacity to refuse treatment, but the role of the psychiatrist in this situation is much broader.

Ethical Questions at the Intersection of Neurotechnology and Psychiatry

Avoiding Confidentiality Conflicts

Today when the ground was no longer...

As if psychiatrists didn’t have enough to worry about with regard to complying with upcoming Medicare e-Prescribing dictates, there is now a second layer of complication . . . the interim final rule from the DEA, which prescribes requirements for physicians who want to use electronic prescribing for controlled substances.

Dramatology approaches human encounters, events, and scenes as dramatic enactments of characters in conflict and crisis.

As a psychiatrist who has lymphoma, I have developed a deep understanding of the ways in which our training can help us help patients who find themselves forced to deal with the complicated emotional aspects that accompany various forms of cancer. I hope these insights will be useful to psychiatrists as they wrestle with the problems that plague their patients who are coping with cancer.

The risk of breast cancer recurrence related to some SSRI antidepressants interacting with and reducing the effectiveness of tamoxifen was quantified in 2 epidemiological studies published in February.

When I was a grad student-back in the Jurassic Era of molecular manipulations-my lab mates and I were all transfixed by the notion of a new technology: knockout animals (KOAs). This was because of its promise to solve a vexing problem.

After reading Dr Daniel Carlat’s heartfelt piece in the April 19, 2010, New York Times Magazine (“Mind Over Meds”), I was struck by several things. The first was Dr Carlat’s eloquence regarding the dilemmas of psychiatric practice. Second was how his experience may represent a generation of psychiatrists who were trained during an era of drug discovery wrapped in the exciting promise of “Biological Psychiatry.”

Bipolar disorder is recognized as a serious disorder. It has an adverse impact on many areas of a child’s development-including cognitive, emotional, and social functioning. Children with BD are at significant risk for substance use and suicidality. Further identification of effective treatments is a pressing public health concern.

Almost the first memory I have of a physician is our family doctor at my bedside, leaning over to press his warm fingers against my neck and beneath my jaw. I’m 5, maybe 6 years old. I have a fever and a sore throat, and Dr Gerace is carefully palpating my cervical and submandibular lymph nodes.

A recent meta-analysis showed that diagnoses generated from clinical evaluations often do not agree with the results of structured and semistructured interviews-together called standardized diagnostic interviews (SDIs).

I sent the letter that begins on page 4 to the Trustees of the APA on April 8, 2010. It contains an urgent plea that the Trustees move immediately to correct the increasingly wayward course of DSM5. The DSM5 Task Force is about to begin a field trial that is a complete mistake: