Special Reports have long been a mainstay feature of the monthly Psychiatric Times issues, but this two-part report on cultural competence and diversity is unique in both style and content. 

Introduction: Reflections on the Crossing of Cultures in Psychiatry

This evidence-based tool is composed of a series of questionnaires that assist clinicians in making person-centered cultural assessments to inform diagnosis and treatment planning.

The DSM-5 Cultural Formulation Interview and the Evolution of Cultural Assessment in Psychiatry

The authors share a model for psychiatrists interested in collaborating with traditional healing and medicine.

Traditional Healing Concepts and Psychiatry: Collaboration and Integration in Psychiatric Practice

Improving religious competence among clinicians is vital if everyday psychiatric care is to become truly person-centered.

Religious Understanding as Cultural Competence: Issues for Clinicians

The author of this book tells the story of the evolution of psychiatry from a place of skepticism and distain to its more recent emergence as a modern neuroscience.

A Tour de Force of the History of Psychiatry

Several recent publications are informative to clinicians on the topic of suicide in children and adolescents. Some of the most salient findings are reviewed here.

New Findings About Youth Suicide

Renal failure is not an uncommon disorder either in the general public or in patients with psychiatric disorders, but accompanying depression, anxiety, and loss must be attended to during such an illness.

Clinical Considerations in Renal Failure, Depression, and Delirium

We are a long way from understanding the complex neural basis for behaviors such as mentalization. But, we can mentally imagine the scientific pursuit of questions, one after another, that might get us to that goal.

Mental Representations and Unilateral Neglect: A Revealing Clinical Study

It is clear that unless things change radically in the coming decades, psychiatry-like other branches of medicine-will have to accommodate itself to the effects of disruptions to existing ecosystems.

Can Climate Be Hazardous to Your Mental Health? A View From History

Many of us are seeing patients who have been prescribed potentially addicting medication by another physician, and our level of vigilance needs to be high. 

The Most Widely Prescribed Med for Medicare Recipients?

How to frame a novel transactional model for attending to both patient and physician character styles and provide strategies for identifying and managing these interactions.

The “Hateful Patient” Revisited: A Transactional View of Difficult Physician-Patient Relationships

A new study shows that rates of severe mental illness in youths have dropped substantially since 1996. What might study results portend for psychiatric practice? 

Severe Mental Illness Declining in Young People

Sometimes when proposing a treatment plan, I flash to an image of my patient seated beside me on this orchard bench watching orioles court in May’s sharp sunlight...

A Curious Kind of Love

Physicians recognize many features of schizophrenia, but one neglected area is the common symptom of a poor self-other boundary-in fact, this has also been neglected as a criterion for the DSM.

Schizophrenia: It’s Not Just About Dopamine

There is a myth circulating in the blogosphere-usually among the most extreme critics of our profession-that there exists some monolithic entity called “Psychiatry” (with a capital “P”).

Psychiatry Is Alive and-Well, It’s Complicated

A beautifully detailed algorithm for treatment options in bipolar disorder is described.

Tectonic Shift in the Conception of Bipolar Disorder

There is no worse death than a hospital death. This requires preparation and preparation requires recognizing that dying is a necessary, and indeed desirable, part of life.

Dying Well Means Dying at Home

To determine a treatment plan, psychiatrists may consider the social and cultural context before they attempt to formulate an assessment and diagnosis of depression or another psychiatric disorder. The Cultural Formulation gives us the tools to do just that.

Cultural Context: The Essential Ingredient for a Whole Formulation

Many older adults experience loneliness, profound psychosocial changes, and loss. Screening, recognition, and treatment of mood disorders in late life significantly decrease morbidity associated with many problems encountered by the elderly.

Update on Geriatric Depression and Anxiety

Findings on mood disorders, and the disability associated with it, speak to the need for effective treatments for depression.

The Latest on Treatment-Resistant Depression

Multiple perspectives are required to fully understand a concept. This seems to be the growing consensus with the schizophrenia spectrum disorders.

Schizophrenic Disorders: Is There an Elephant?

So many had stared at John Nash, for different reasons, at different times. Now that his own stare is frozen in time, the challenge is to understand the meaning of the stares that he had received during his life.

Vol 32 No 6