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I have been writing Molecules of the Mind every month since 1993. In all that time, I never once broached the subject I will address here--consciousness.

"Positive Psychology: A More Direct Route To Happiness" (Psychiatric Times, September 2007) brought to mind that no one asks an internist to which school of medicine he or she belongs.

Each edition of this book, beginning with the first in 1991, has received much use while sitting on my office shelf. The editions have spanned the modern era of child psychopharmacology and, along with the works of S. P. Kutcher, have offered practical clinical guidance in choosing and monitoring medications in children and teenagers while also providing an overview of the literature that supports child psychopharmacology.

The Senate on September 27 passed what may be the first ever veterans' mental health bill. The Joshua Omvig Veterans' Suicide Prevention Act is named after a young man who came home from Operation Iraqi Freedom with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and was unable to get mental health care from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).

Patients with chronic pain and head injury frequently have comorbid anxiety and depressive disorders, with depressive disorders appearing to be more predominant. A number of studies show that depressive spectrum illness develops in 40% to 80% of patients with chronic pain; in a majority of these cases, the mood disorder is caused by chronic pain.

I was taken ill with the flu. They gave me up. The paper had my obit set in type. . . . My hair turned white and then it fell out. The first time I tried to rise to a sitting position I fell and broke an arm. I had phlebitis in one leg and they said I'd never walk again.

Comorbidity of psychiatric syndromes is quite common-in a 12-month period, almost 50% of adults in the United States with any psychiatric disorder had 2 or more disorders.

She was 57 years old, widowed with 2 grown children, and was being evaluated as an aspirant for the Episcopal diaconate. An open, warm, and articulate woman, she described the major turning point in her life as her husband's sudden cardiac death when he was 42 and she was 37. "It came out of the blue," she said. "One moment he was here and the next moment he was gone."

I was very pleased to read Robert Langs' letter ("Violence Against Mental Health Professionals," Psychiatric Times, July 2007), in the wake of Dr Fenton's death.

In my last column I used the ancient metaphor from Homer's Odyssey of being caught between the two monsters of Scylla and Charybdis to describe the predicament of contemporary physicians treating chronic pain.

Most estimates suggest that there are just over a million persons living with HIV/AIDS in the United States. According to CDC data, between 2001 and 2005, an average of 37,127 new cases of HIV infection, HIV infection and later AIDS, and concurrent HIV infection and AIDS were diagnosed each year.

Paraphilias and paraphilia-related disorders (nonparaphilic sexual compulsivity or sexual addiction) are sexual disorders that predominantly afflict men.

Here is the conundrum: You have completed treatment with a fascinating and complex patient. Mr A has bipolar depression, Marfan syndrome, and hypothyroidism. You not only managed to navigate around the rocks of his medical problems, but you also managed to stabilize Mr A's bipolar disorder using a combination of lithium (Eskalith, Lithobid), thyroxine, and interpersonal therapy. You would now like to share your experience with colleagues, so you write up the case history; then suddenly, you are seized with misgivings.

Although methadone (Dolophine, Methadose) is primarily thought of as treatment for opioid addiction, it is also an excellent and underused analgesic. This column discusses the issues to consider when deciding whether to prescribe methadone for pain relief.

Since the revision of DSM-III, high rates of co-occurring psychiatric disorders have been observed, particularly in cases of moderate and severe psychiatric illness. The reason lies in the design of the diagnostic system itself: DSM-IV is a descriptive, categorical system that splits psychiatric behaviors and symptoms into numerous distinct disorders, and uses few exclusionary hierarchies to eliminate multiple diagnoses.

A recent analysis that found a 40-fold increase in the diagnosis of bipolar disorder in youth has highlighted diagnostic dilemmas and prompted calls for more research studies.

Among clinicians and researchers in geriatric psychiatry, interest in late-life bipolar disorder is growing, fueled not only by the increasing size of this clinical population but also by the recent discovery that mood stabilizers such as lithium may influence the pathogenesis of Alzheimer disease.

Bipolar disorder (BD) in later life is a complex and confounding neuropsychiatric syndrome with diagnostic and therapeutic challenges.

Many recall the phrase "To know syphilis is to know medicine." Now Lyme disease (Lyme borreliosis), the new "great imitator," is the ultimate challenge to the breadth and depth of our knowledge. In psychiatry, we generally treat mental symptoms or syndromes rather than the underlying cause of a disorder.

The use of psychedelic plants and drugs in psychiatric medicine has been a promise for more than half a century, suppressed by a draconian legal response to the epidemic of drug abuse in the 1960s. This 2-volume work seeks to reverse the suppression of scientific inquiry in this field by bringing together a comprehensive airing of the topic.

School-based drug abuse prevention programs do more than just effectively decrease drug use and misuse among children and adolescents, according to a study by Gilbert J. Botvin, PhD and associates, they may also reduce adolescent delinquency, verbal and physical aggression, and fighting.

Poetry of the Times

In September, Gov Rod Blagojevich (D, Ill) signed Senate Bill 234 into law, allowing early state intervention for persons with severe mental illnesses. Before this enactment, the state required that persons must be a danger to themselves or others before court-ordered treatment could take place.

The role of the forensic psychiatrist frequently requires straddling a fence. On the one side lie the standard function and commensurate ethics of a physician; on the other are the needs of the legal system calling for objectivity, truth, and justice.

Adolescence is a time of great importance during which children make extraordinary developmental strides. According to Erik Erikson, adolescents consolidate a self-concept by struggling with essential questions such as Who am I? and What is my role in life?

Ataxia is a relatively rare, genetic neuromuscular disorder, affecting about 150,000 persons in the United States. It is one of those disorders for which knowledge is growing but is slow to get to the practicing clinician. Hence, many persons with ataxia go for years with no diagnosis or a misdiagnosis. Alternately, because ataxia is a progressive disorder without a cure, many patients are given a stark diagnosis and sent home to cope with the disorder on their own.

Widespread media reports and billboard campaigns decrying a methamphetamine epidemic are drawing attention away from the greater and more entrenched use of cocaine, according to a National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) scientist speaking at the American Society of Addiction Medicine's (ASAM) 38th Annual Medical-Scientific Conference, held in Miami, April 26 to 29.

Of the many bits of wisdom my parents shared with me as a teenager, one stands out as particularly useful: "John, 90% of the things you worry about will never happen to you!" I still think about this comforting observation from time to time, especially now that I have my own children, and I furrow my brow because I wonder how they--or anybody else--could come up with such an optimistic statistic.

When offered a gift by a patient or a patient's family, a psychiatrist faces a significant practical challenge to negotiate "the poles of rule-bound rigor and individually tailored flexibility," the McLean Hospital Ethics Committee wrote in a recent article.

Virtual games, such as World of Warcraft, The Sims, and Second Life, are played by thousands every day, allowing people, worldwide, to connect and share information. In fact, the virtual "worlds" that can be created in these games are now being used to make money (through buying and selling virtual objects), to form partnerships and friendships, and even to conduct business; it is easy to see how many become engrossed in this alternative life.