Insufficient intake of essential fatty acids (EFAs) may contribute to the pathogenesis of mental diseases, while their supplementation may relieve some symptoms, according to researchers who attended the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Workshop on Omega-3 Essential Fatty Acids and Psychiatric Disorders held in Bethesda, Md., in September 1998.
Just as the first scattered incidents of homicide involving urban children in the early 1980s were not isolated episodes precipitated by "criminally ill" children, the recent episodes of school homicide in nonurban middle-class America, including the massacre in Littleton, Colo., are not isolated incidents of violence involving seriously "mentally ill" children.
The Office for Protection from Research Risks (OPRR), an agency operating under the aegis of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, launched an investigation in April aimed at determining whether young boys were endangered during the course of experiments involving the drug fenfluramine (Pondimin).
Every year, more than half of newly approved drugs and biologics considered likely to be prescribed for children lack labeling information on safe and effective use. Seeking to rectify this situation, the FDA recently issued final regulations requiring new drugs and biologics that are therapeutically important for children or will be commonly used in children to have labeling information on safe pediatric use.
After a teenager's suicide attempt, her desperate and bewildered parents dragged her to a mental health clinic. The 16-year-old admitted to drinking nearly every day and using an assortment of other illicit drugs. Only after a month in treatment did the clinician learn that the teenager had been molested when she was 8 years old by an uncle and threatened with death if she ever told her parents.
Nothing is sacred in America's pop culture. So when it embraces any topic, we've grown used to the relentless distortion that occurs, one that transforms reality into an odd combination of fact and fantasy.
In the two years since receiving a $1.5 million private grant from William and Joy Ruane to study the effects of psychiatric medications in children and adolescents, the division of child psychiatry at New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI)-the nation's oldest psychiatric research facility-has opened a pediatric psychopharmacology research unit and established a federally supported research unit in pediatric psychopharmacology (RUPP), one of the first in the United States.
There is a substantial constituency for alternative medicine. Worldwide, 70% to 90% of all health care "ranges from self-care according to folk principles, to care given in an organized health care system based on an alternative tradition or practice." As many as one-third of all Americans are reported to have some belief in alternative medicine or to be actively using nonmainstream remedies.
Death Sentence, Ethics, Psychiatry, Competency, Execution, Prisoner, Psychiatrists
In its 1986 decision in Ford v. Wainwright, the U.S. Supreme Court found that death row prisoners had a constitutional right not to be executed if they were incompetent (477 U.S. 399 [1986]). Competence for execution-an odd concept, but one whose roots go back to biblical times-usually requires that a prisoner understand the nature of the punishment about to be imposed and why it is being imposed.
In its 1986 decision in Ford v. Wainwright, the U.S. Supreme Court found that death row prisoners had a constitutional right not to be executed if they were incompetent (477 U.S. 399 [1986]). Competence for execution-an odd concept, but one whose roots go back to biblical times-usually requires that a prisoner understand the nature of the punishment about to be imposed and why it is being imposed.
In its 1986 decision in Ford v. Wainwright, the U.S. Supreme Court found that death row prisoners had a constitutional right not to be executed if they were incompetent (477 U.S. 399 [1986]). Competence for execution-an odd concept, but one whose roots go back to biblical times-usually requires that a prisoner understand the nature of the punishment about to be imposed and why it is being imposed.
To understand our fascination with drugs in the first place, we need to ask some basic questions, such as "Why do we like to take poison in small quantities?" The truthful answer is always some variation of "To feel better." How does this come about, and why do we have so much trouble with it?
Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has received an extraordinary amount of attention in the popular media over the past eight months. Stories concerning the disorder, and especially its treatment with stimulant medication, have appeared in many major newspapers, news magazines and television news, entertainment and talk show programs.
Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in adults is a common-and, frequently undiagnosed-psychiatric disorder. This article will focus on the symptoms, associated features, diagnosis, differential diagnosis, prevalence, etiology and treatment of this illness.
Since 1980, criteria for diagnosing bipolar disorder in adults have also been used to diagnose mania in children, with some modifications to adjust for age.
Personality disorders are characterized by the presence of inflexible and maladaptive patterns of perceiving oneself and relating to the environment that result in psychosocial impairment or subjective distress. The enduring nature of the behaviors, their impact on social functioning, the lack of clear boundaries between normality and illness, and the patient's perception of the symptoms as not being foreign make this group of conditions more difficult to conceptualize than the more typical, episodic mental disorders.
