Special Reports

What Every Psychiatrist Needs to Know to Be Prepared

Decreasing the Clinician’s Risk

Keys to diagnosis, assessment, and management.

An overview of the critical issues involved in overcoming personal and organizational barriers to help substance abusers quit smoking.

Over the past century, the syndrome currently referred to as ADHD has been conceptualized in relation to varying cognitive problems including attention, reward response, executive functioning, and other cognitive processes.

Any person who once “drew a blank” during an exam is familiar with the horrors of cognitive difficulties: that terrible moment is for most of us so rare that it remains a traumatic memory for years to come. Imagine those who suffer from protracted cognitive difficulties.

Subjective complaints of impaired concentration, memory, and attention are common in people with major depressive disorder (MDD), and research shows that a variety of structural brain abnormalities are associated with MDD.1 These findings have intensified the interest in quantitative assessment of cognitive and neuropsychological performance in patients with mood disorders. Many studies that used standardized cognitive tests have found that mild cognitive abnormalities are associated with MDD and that these abnormalities are more pronounced in persons who have MDD with melancholic or psychotic features

Many people assume that it is the emotional and psychotic symptoms that make it difficult for a person with schizophrenia to function in everyday life. In fact, research indicates that cognitive impairment is a major reason why functional outcome is so poor.1

We need to have a framework to make certain that our interventions are balanced, safe, and a function of the existing evidence.