 In his book, How We Age: A Doctor’s Journey Into the Heart of Growing Old, Dr Marc Agronin helps reduce the stigma of ageism and provides clinical guidance for seasoned geriatric psychiatrists, primary care clinicians, and medical students alike.

How We Age: A Doctor’s Journey Into the Heart of Growing Old

This article explores the use of functional analytic psychotherapy (FAP)-a behavioral, evidenced-based approach to psychotherapy that can add psychotherapeutic benefit to your existing brief approaches during medication checks.

The Medication Check as Psychotherapeutic Opportunity

 Insurance often pushes pills rather than talk therapy, believing drugs are less expensive (although there is a fair amount of evidence to the contrary).

Hippocrates Under Contract

 ADHD is often inaccurately diagnosed and prematurely treated with medication-especially under the pressure of heavy drug company marketing to physicians and direct advertising to parents and teachers.

Dangerous New Treatment Guidelines for ADHD Unveiled

 More than 50 years ago, Charles M. Schulz, creator of “Peanuts,” coined the term “Happiness is a warm puppy.” Schulz may have been more visionary than he recognized. 

Children and Pets: A Winning Combination

Although memoirs have become all the rage, they are rarely written by anyone in the field of psychiatry . . . and for good reason. 

Witness to an Extreme Century: A Memoir

The purpose of suicide risk assessment is to identify treatable and modifiable risks and protective factors that inform the patient’s treatment and safety management requirements. 

Improving Suicide Risk Assessment

 Max Fink, M.D., Professor of Psychiatry and Neurology Emeritus at Stony Brook University School of Medicine, received the Thomas William Salmon Award for outstanding contributions to the field of psychiatry.

A Tribute to Max Fink, MD

 The report notes that pain is a significant public health problem that affects more than 100 million Americans, costs our society at least $560 to $659 billion annually, and can be severely detrimental to the lives of sufferers. 

A New Report on Pain in America: Like Déjà Vu All Over Again

 Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life is not easy entertainment, but for psychiatrists who might welcome an encounter with a brilliant, uncompromising mind, The Tree of Life is enthralling.

The Tree of Life

 “If you were a ship, where would you sail?” . . . “What is your favorite hockey team?” and “What will you do if you don’t get into medical school?”

If You Were a Cookie, What Kind Would You Be?

 A new Medicaid demonstration program slated to begin next year will pilot a solution to the problem of “psychiatric boarding,” which has plagued general hospitals for many years. 

Medicaid Demonstration Aims to Reduce “Psychiatric Boarding”

In theory, psychiatrists possess no special skills for determining capacity of a patient to accept or refuse medical care, yet a large percentage of a psychosomatic physician’s work nonetheless involves capacity evaluations.

You Say “Yes,” I Say “No,” You Say “Goodbye,” and I Say “Hello”

Currently, there are 350,000 Americans who receive maintenance dialysis for renal failure, and this predominantly elderly population with multiple comorbidities is growing.

Psychiatric Issues for Patients With Renal Disease

This article provides background information on the FGIDs for psychiatrists and a review of recent research on the biopsychosocial mechanisms that contribute to the illness experience.

Functional GI Disorders and Psychiatry

 Psychache (sīk-āk), a neologism coined by suicidologist Edwin Shneidman, is unbearable psychological pain-hurt, anguish, soreness, and aching. 

Suicide: Psychache and Alienation

 “I’m so cold, so weary in my abandonment. Go and find my Mother, O Wind. Take me to the house I never knew.”

Tales from the New Asylum: Slow Poison

 Biomarkers for mental disorders is a field whose time has come. Optimists will say within a few years, pessimists might say a decade or beyond.

Biomarkers for Mental Disorders: A Field Whose Time Has Come

 When working with patients who are at high risk for relapse or misuse of prescription medications, careful documentation of the informed consent process is a helpful risk management tool. 

Self-Medication: Medicating the Doctor, Medicating the Patient

 Researchers have tried lots of different kinds of tests from EEGs to blood-based biomarkers. Now genetic tests are a very popular means of trying to understand different psychiatric disorders.

Psychiatric Times Vol 28 No 11