Addiction & Substance Use

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.

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.

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.

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

The goal of this article is to improve recognition of comorbid psychiatric and movement disorders and to help the reader formulate a management strategy using a multidisciplinary approach.

The issue of context and its relationship to disorderness extends well beyond panic attacks: it arises in nearly all psychiatric diagnoses not explicitly defined contextually.

Panic attacks are nearly always pathological and disordered states, even when they occur in an understandable context.

What we know for sure is that for all the young children and adults who were killed in Newtown, their world ended a week ago. Soon after the tragedy, one of the fathers of a child killed tearfully pleaded for society to learn from what happened in order to prevent future mass murders. Here, recommendations from a psychiatrist.

This article reviews the recent knowledge about glutamate in different psychiatric conditions based on research published in the past year.

So does penis size matter? What we can see is that the dimensions don't, but the feelings and fantasies do.

This article aims to provide the general psychiatric community with an update on the major findings on the biology of ASDs as well as the advances in diagnostic and interventional strategies.

In this time of Thanksgiving, the excerpt from “Thank Heaven for Little Girls,” most famously sung by Maurice Chevalier, conveys one of life’s blessings for fathers.

The number of medical diseases that can present with psychotic symptoms (ie, delusions, hallucinations) is legion. A thorough differential diagnosis of possible medical and toxic causes of psychosis is necessary to avoid the mistaken attribution of psychosis to a psychiatric disorder.

Although a romantic comedy, Silver Linings Playbook does not romanticize mental illness for the patient or for the family. What the film does display though is that a life with mental illness effectively treated can be filled with meaning, happiness, and love.

Now that President Obama has been re-elected, the Monday morning quarterbacking has begun. What went right in each campaign? What went wrong? Who is next to run in 2016?

A new screening tool based on the previously developed mnemonic designed to assist physicians with obtaining a psychosocial history from adolescents as part of a routine visit was developed by researchers at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario.

Research over the past 2 decades has demonstrated that ADHD occurs frequently and causes considerable suffering in patients and their families. ADHD begins in early childhood and persists through adolescence and into adulthood in 70% of those affected.

Editor's note: Being a Therapist features intimate portraits of psychotherapists in their own work spaces.

Alcoholism is a chronic and serious disorder with often devastating consequences. One out of three families in the United States is negatively impacted by a family member's excessive drinking and painful drinking-related problems.

Assessments of partial culpability of adolescents are difficult in individual cases; however, the courts are moving away from mandatory sentencing to individual determinations, even for the most heinous crimes.

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) in children and adolescents is a major public health problem. Psychiatrists have a crucial role in the management of young persons who have a TBI.

If we, as a people, continue to sacrifice genuine security for a false sense of freedom, we shall find ourselves in a nation neither secure nor free.

The president and CEO of the Association of American Medical Colleges outlines the reasons psychiatrists are well positioned to lead in this emerging culture of medicine.

Contemporary psychoanalysts know that behavior is a form of communication. This book describes the work being done at the Austen Riggs Center, a psychodynamic institution in Stockbridge, Mass.

A plethora of studies support the hypothesis that inflammation plays a role in the pathophysiology of major psychiatric disorders.

"You turn on the television, and violence is there. You go to a movie, and violence is there."

The article focuses on eating disorders in males and presents information on similarities and differences between males and females as they relate to risk factors, clinical presentation, and treatment.

Boys with ADHD can present with different cognitive and behavioral patterns than girls with ADHD. Despite these factors, girls with ADHD remain at significant psychosocial risk into adulthood.