News

This week's news stories: intimate partner violence, gun control and mental illness, eating disorders, and more.

About a year ago, I wrote the blog “Are Dogs Man's Best Therapist?” To my surprise, it turned out to be a very popular one. Since then, dogs continue to be in the news for their therapeutic effect, including being brought to Newtown right after the mass murder there.

Psychiatric disorders, such as primary sleep disturbances, depression, substance abuse, mania, sexually inappropriate behaviors, and psychosis, can complicate the care of patients with dementia.

The Clinical Assessment Interview for Negative Symptoms (CAINS) is an effective tool in measuring negative symptoms in schizophrenia, according to a recent study.

DSM-5 must emphasize that physical symptoms deserve the respect of a thorough work-up before assuming their cause is psychiatric. And people with defined medical illnesses should not be casually mislabeled as also mentally ill just because they are upset about being sick.

A multimodal treatment program that centered on a cognitive-behavioral approach using exposure and response prevention was effective in treating OCD comorbid with eating disorders.

Demonstrating the importance of psychiatric advance directives and the benefits and obstacles involved in implementing them.

It is clear that the prognosis for schizophrenia is much better when patients achieve drug abstinence, including in the domains of depression, quality of life, and community integration.

The news media has always been in the business of searching for "the right sort of madness" to capture the public's imagination.

According to the CDC's latest published report, there were 38,364 suicides in the US in 2010-an average of 105 each day. Globally, an estimated 1 million suicides occur annually.

Refractory psychiatric illnesses are no different from complicated infectious diseases in that they both require multiple concurrent medications and treatment modalities.

I pictured him at his waiting room door . . . clutching a chart, catching eyes, . . . calling out a name, bewildered

Karl Doghramji, MD, Sleep Disorders Section Editor for Psychiatric Times, is Professor of Psychiatry, Neurology, and Medicine at Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University, and Medical Director of the Jefferson Sleep Disorders Center at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, in Philadelphia. Dr Doghramji is also Chair of the Albert M. Biele, MD Memorial Lectureship in Psychiatry in the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Jefferson Medical College.

The team psychiatrist for Super Bowl Champs, the Baltimore Ravens, draws on his own professional career of working with athletes of all ages and levels and provides a comprehensive presentation of the literature in the emerging field of sports psychiatry.

Gun owners and non-gun-owners alike support gun control policies that account for mental illness, according to a study published in a recent issue of NEJM.

Perceived relationship power helps to explain the association between intimate partner violence and mental health issues.

Mindfulness training is a viable treatment tool that rivals psychopharmaceutical agents for the treatment of addiction, anxiety, depression, and other psychiatric disorders.

For patients with treatment-resistant depression-especially geriatric patients-ECT is a viable treatment option . . . one that should no longer be relegated to the option of last resort.

Emil Kraepelin diagnosed the paranoid, catatonic, and hebephrenic forms of dementia praecox, a disease he created.

Insomnia-a sleep disorder that can pose impairments far more debilitating than than problems with cognition (eg, difficulty processing, unclear thinking).

Both positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia combined with those of a mood disorder led to a psychiatric diagnosis; later, a neurological diagnosis of anti–NMDA receptor autoimmune encephalitis was made.

In line with adolescents' interest in interactive video games, a computerized cognitive-behavioral therapy intervention that is an interactive fantasy game for depressed adolescents has been developed.

Planck's Law of Generations: scientific change doesn't happen by changing minds, but by changing generations.

Mental rigidity can occur at any age, while wisdom and experience are hard-won--over time.

Movement abnormalities and psychiatric symptoms often overlap and exacerbate one another. Can psychopharmacological agents induce movement disorders?

Newtown’s loss has finally forced us to look more deeply at violence and the treatment of mental health within our society.

Here's to the lovely trees of Jersey, my home . . . town streets lined with linden and larch, . . . poplar and elm, flowered locusts scenting

Being a Therapist features intimate portraits of psychotherapists in their own work spaces. An excerpt of his interview with Terry Smolar, PhD, follows.

A list of recent articles highlighting the complexity of psychiatric and systemic illness, both in terms of overlapping clinical presentation and in the degrees to which systemic illness and psychiatric illness affect each other.