News

TOC: 2010-10 October

SPECIAL REPORT: CHILD AND ADOLESCENT PYCHIATRY Keys to Success in ADHD Treatment Clinicians who treat children with ADHD face a challenging conundrum. Although our understanding of ADHD and its evidence-based treatments has increased significantly in recent years, the number of successful treatment outcomes has not.

Bipolar Disorder Quiz

Which medications have typically been used as first-line treatment for acute mania? Is comorbidity the rule or the exception in patients with bipolar disorder? These questions and more in this week's quiz.

I am a Registered Nurse of 37 years who has worked in hospice care and psychiatric emergency; I’ve worked as a med/surgical manager and (now) as an inpatient psychiatric nurse. Throughout it all, I most enjoy seeing a patient realize he/she is getting well; I also enjoy conducting small teaching groups to help the patient know how to stay well.

In a recent issue of Psychiatric News, members of the DSM-5 Task Force reported on the dimensional measures being considered for DSM-5. These take 2 forms: severity scales for individual disorders, and “cross-cutting” measures that cut across disorders. For this brief piece, I will focus on the latter, the more interesting and controversial of the proposed dimensions.

This table provides links to many valuable resources for child and adolescent psychiatry. A list of Web sites, books, organizations, and pivotal articles on ADHD and other topics.

In essence, screen media constitute neurologically potent, arousing input to the developing brain. Unlike conventional toxins, their effects are mediated by sense organs. However, they have demonstrable effects on brain activity, and on behavior and function.

This is both an exciting and challenging time to be a child and adolescent psychiatrist. New findings are changing our knowledge of childhood psychopathology. This Special Report discusses current developments in diagnosis, treatments, and problems for children and adolescents.

Designers of descriptive diagnostic criteria for mental disorders face some of the same problems as fishermen. Fishermen, like nosologists, want to capture not just any fish but a particular kind. Fishermen deal with this problem in various ways.