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Xavier Amador, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and an internationally sought-after speaker. Dr. Amador has over 25 years of experience working with adults, families, and couples. In addition to continuing to his private practice in New York City, Dr. Amador is the Founder and Director of the LEAP Institute. LEAP is for therapists, family members, law enforcement officers, and anyone seeking to break through an impasse with someone who is convinced they are right and you are wrong. He and the faculty at LEAP conduct regional seminars for couples and other groups.

Anyone working in the mental health field will recognize that in patients with extreme irritability, explosive behavior, or quick mood changes, bipolar disorder (BD) is often unquestionably diagnosed.

The Naked Lady Who Stood on Her Head will appeal to lay readers who like to solve puzzles, as well as to seasoned clinicians who will be challenged by its wide array of intricate cases.

Does cognitive rehabilitation provides optimal improvements in functional outcome for patients with schizophrenia? What percentage of patients with schizophrenia who have comorbid obsessive compulsive disorder? This and more in this week's quiz.

Deliberate self-harm (DSH) is a behavior in which a person commits an act with the purpose of physically harming himself or herself with or without a real intent of suicide.

DSM-IV, published in 1994, did not include a cannabis withdrawal disorder diagnosis. DSM-IV-TR clearly stated the reason for the omission: “Symptoms of possible cannabis withdrawal . . . have been described in association with the use of very high doses, but their clinical significance is uncertain.”1

Every new healthcare professional that creates a free account with Psychiatric Times.com will trigger our donation of $10 to the international non-profit organization Doctors Without Borders/Mdecins Sans Frontires (MSF) – a non-profit delivering emergency medical assistance to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, malnutrition, natural disasters, or exclusion from health care in nearly 60 countries. It's our way of promoting global social good for doctors caring for those in desperate need. Our goal is to donate $25,000 over the month of June – enough to immunize and nourish over 10,000 children and provide clean water to thousands of people in need.

The latest research on psychiatric disorders will be presented at the 2011 Psych Congress in Las Vegas, Nevada, held from November 7 - 10. The staff of Psychiatric Times will provide news coverage on a number of topics including including ADHD, anxiety, bipolar disorder, depression, and schizophrenia. In addition, we will be interviewing many of the faculty and posting the interviews online as podcasts for download.

When my clinic manager told me that prison may be the best place to practice psychiatry nowadays, I didn’t believe him. After all, prisons often seem like a world apart, often in isolated rural areas or in windowless, nondescript urban buildings.

Things are now much more complex and the burden on doctors and practice managers is greater than ever before. Here’s how to plan for it.

Whether planned or unplanned, a physician's departure from your practice will definitely have an impact, so be prepared.

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The personality proposals are certainly not the most dangerous part of DSM-5-but they do win the prize for being absolutely the silliest. They offer a riot of impossibly intricate detail with a level of complexity that could never be of any use in any real world setting.

The evidence-based approach to bipolar depression symptoms includes treatment with lithium, conventional unimodal antidepressants, lamotrigine, or divalproex.

Antidrug vaccines represent an exciting area of development in the pharmacological treatment of chemical dependency. In addition to the clinical trials being conducted on vaccines for cocaine and nicotine dependence, preclinical development of vaccines for methamphetamine and heroin is ongoing.

The focus of this Special Report is on some future-oriented aspects of psychopharmacology. First, it is an eclectic set of articles that cover treating resistant depression, using currently illegal drugs to treat psychiatric problems, and finally the potential of using vaccines to treat substance use disorders.

Our continuation of a survey on the accuracy of a recent article “Talk Doesn’t Pay, So Psychiatry Turns Instead to Drug Therapy” that seems to reduce the practice of psychiatry to a 15-minute med check.

In the interest of giving readers of Psychiatric Times a glimpse into this rich past, from time to time, H-Madness would like to share some examples of lesser known, yet enlightening, primary sources from the history of mental health.

Aside from its reckless proposals for dangerous new diagnoses, the most characteristic thing about DSM-5 has been its remarkably poor planning and its consistently missed deadlines.

The NIMH Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) project raises many questions about DSM-5 and future DSMs.

The thing to remember that there is not a pill for every worry or life problem and that pills can sometimes make things worse.

Whenever a suicide happens in the New Asylums, a palpable, muted dread descends over the institution. It stays there in full force for weeks and months afterwards, sometimes longer. After that, it is added as another sedimentary layer to the strata and culture of the particular institution. Before things get too deeply buried, it is important to excavate.

ECT is making something of a comeback because it remains a paragon of efficacy amidst other relatively disappointing treatments.

II would have to wait until the next day, when K’s internal flames of resistance had died down, to learn why he had burned so fiercely. When we finally sat across from one another, his embers still glowed, and I learned that the source of his combustion had been the classic lose-lose scenario.

There is wide agreement that memory loss associated with ECT is short-term, usually temporary, and rarely has a major impact, “although it shouldn’t be taken lightly,” according to Ross.

For those of us who treat seriously emotionally disturbed children, We’ve Got Issues is a welcome change from the invectives of those who believe that the use psychotropic medication is virtually criminal.

One of the most remarkable discoveries in the field of life span alteration occurred in the past century and has to do with caloric restriction.

Richard Berlin, M.D.: “There is something about the condensed pressure of poetry that feels very natural to me.”