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One of the impulse-control disorders, Intermittend Explosive Disorder includes serious acts of aggression against person or property that are completely out of proportion to any provocation.

The 55th Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry will take place in Honolulu, Hawaii on May 12 to 14th, alongside the APA meeting.

The psychiatric emergency room (ER) is an intense, stressful work environment where psychiatrists must perform rapid assessments and make swift treatment decisions.

On January 24, Dr Ronald Pies posted a thoughtful piece titled “Who Can Forgive Jared Loughner?” which advocates the importance of relinquishing hatred in cases like the ones in Tucson and transforming “our revulsion and rage into something higher and nobler.”

Ray Moynihan (who previously gave us the invaluable book "Selling Sickness: How Drug Companies are Turning us All Into Patients") has published a new expose titled "Sex, Lies, and Pharmaceuticals."

Charles Moser, PhD, MD, has forwarded an interesting suggestion to solve the problem of weak diagnoses that have received a free ride through previous revisions of DSM. His is a middle way intended to steer between the contrasting risks of continuing questionable diagnoses and the risks of eliminating them.

What Works for Psychiatrists in Community and Institutional Settings

Childhood and adolescent bullying-and, recently, cyberbullying-is a major public health problem with potentially devastating consequences. In any prevention effort, students need hope and to learn the skills to end the abuse, as described here.

Reflecting on my internship year evokes anxious feelings, despite the fact that I am separated from it by time, distance, and hundreds of positive experiences.

Depression Anxiety Stress Scales (DASS)Hamilton Depression Scale (HAM-D)(PDF-link)Major Depression Inventory (MDI)(PDF-link)Patient Health Questionnaire for Depression and Anxiety (PHQ-4)(PDF) PHQ 9 Modified for Adults/Adolescents (PHQ-A)(PDF)Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-SADS)(PDF)

Major mood disorders have been associated with increased suicidal behavior. This is especially true in patients with a mixed, manic-depressive, or dysphoric-agitated state.

This book is recommended for therapy trainees who are interested in relational psychodynamic approaches and concerned with putting these seemingly abstract concepts into “real world” practice.

Expansion of age-appropriate developmental psycho-therapeutic services must become a top public health priority to make these treatments more widely available to young children and to capture the potential greater benefit of the earliest possible intervention for mental disorders.

Pushing the edge of our understanding into the murky world of association cortex only means that future experiments will be trickier to interpret.

Are you familiar with Google Ngrams? If not, you may find the graphs it produces to be a very visual and interesting way to look back at terms used in psychiatry.

. . . her fixed state is one of intent though fruitless searching. She is inactive not because she is too lazy to work but because work has become meaningless to her; her energy is paralyzed not by sleep but by thought.”

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

The essential feature of private insurance–induced stress disorder (PIISD) is the development of characteristic symptoms following exposure to an insurance-induced traumatic stressor involving direct personal experience of an event or witnessing an event that threatens another person.

NIMH is shifting away from current-generation treatments and toward preclinical drug development and early-phase clinical pharmacology, according to the institute’s director and a workgroup co-chair.

ECT, like abortion, is surrounded by controversy and strong opinions on both sides. Fortunately, for those of us who practice ECT, the discussion is not quite as heated nor the risks as high as for our colleagues in ob-gyn.

Is violent behavior a proxy indicator for the relationship between severity of substance abuse and suicide risk? What has the strongest influence in promoting doubt about a delusion in a patient with schizophrenia? These questions and more.

This letter constitutes my formal resignation from the American Psychiatric Association.

Is your practice ready to begin the EHR transition? Take this simple quiz to find out.

A reporter asked, "Can you do psychotherapy in a cage"? What immediately came to mind was the sociopathic psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter in the movie Silence of the Lambs.

A DSM critic, Andrew Hinderliter sent this perceptive email questioning the wisdom of the most fundamental decision we made in preparing DSM IV-- ie, our goal of keeping the system stable.

Daily meditation over a consistent period of time changes gray matter density in parts of the brain associated with memory, sense of self, empathy, and stress. But more research is needed.

I would like to start off this blog with two stories that happened many years ago.

The selection of Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, 1984 Nobel Peace Prize recipient, to present the convocation lecture at the American Psychiatric Association’s upcoming annual meeting has so outraged some APA members that they have arranged meeting boycotts and protests.