Vol 31 No 7

What is the future of psychiatric assessment and treatment of mood disorders? The articles in this Special Report explore some important aspects and issues.

Here: the history of psychotic depression for the Study of the Pharmacotherapy of Psychotic Depression (STOP-PD), a summary its epidemiology, significance, diagnostic complexity, and treatment, as well as case vignettes.

This article reviews the most recent (after 2010) published guidelines on bipolar depression.

Most, if not all, antidepressants can cause bothersome adverse effects. These are described here along with strategies to help patients cope.

This book is the first scholarly work that attempts to fill the enormous gap in the conventional armamentarium used to treat PTSD.

The limited effectiveness of current approaches provide compelling arguments for effective conventional and complementary interventions aimed at preventing PTSD and treating chronic PTSD. Specifics here.

Cranial electrotherapy devices, soon to be only home-use device approved to treat depression, can be an essential adjunctive treatment to standard modalities of care for soldiers and veterans, says this psychiatrist.

Innovative approaches that advance our understanding of the mechanisms that confer risk for psychiatric illness in youths is the focus.

Is there something in young blood that holds the key to preventing or reversing cognitive decline and/or dementia associated with aging? The answer to that question is the subject of intense recent research. Details here.

Psychiatry must remain a profession defined by an organizing model of the mind, rather than by specific treatment techniques. Psychodynamic psychiatry offers such a model, and it is applicable to all psychiatric patients.

When I learned my first scale at 45 I knew I would never rip loose and free like the pros who started as teenagers, when time didn’t matter and practicing was just another form of play.

A variety of commonly used psychiatric medications increase the risk of heatstroke, leaving psychiatric patients in jails and prisons at risk.

Severe alcohol dependence and frequent relapses in this patient prompts his son to produce a durable power of attorney for health care. He demands that the physicians declare his father to lack decision-making capacity. More in this ethics case report.

Amidst the anguish and heartbreak felt by the victims’ families, there are always two haunting questions: What motivates someone to kill strangers wholesale in a seemingly senseless way? And what, if anything, can we do to stop these tragedies from recurring?

If you’ve never surfed the web for sites that critically examine psychiatry, I highly recommend it-though it’s not for the faint of heart.

More than 50 years have passed since One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was published, and almost 40 years since the movie was released, but the issues seem as relevant today as they were back then. If you haven’t seen the film or have forgotten what you saw, see it again as soon as you can. Here's why.

When psychosocial treatments are delivered with high quality and fidelity, outcomes improve. That is the parity all of us should be fighting for. More in this commentary by NIMH Director Thomas Insel, MD.

In Angst: Origins of Anxiety and Depression, Dr Jeffrey Kahn offers an alternative perspective on the evolution of common mental health disorders by considering the adaptive nature of symptoms that modern clinicians deem pathological.