Anxiety & Stress Disorders

James Dao reports in the New York Times that the military is considering 2 steps to reduce its startling rate of active duty suicides-which is approaching an unacceptable one suicide every day. Both measures are completely sensible, but neither goes nearly far enough.

With understandable urgency, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has made suicide one of his top priorities, instructing commanders at all levels to feel acutely accountable for it. The numbers are startling. On average 1 active duty soldier is killing himself each day--twice the number of combat deaths and twice the civilian rate.

After scoring high on the Panic Disorder Severity Scale, this patient sought panic-focused psychodynamic therapy.

Importantly for lay and clinician readers alike, the book Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety reads as humor-laced triumph with many lost battles along the way rather than enduring unrelenting tragedy.

How can clinicians reliably identify comorbid drug and alcohol use disorders in patients with anxiety disorders?

ADHD has been significantly associated with a primary diagnosis of impulse control disorder and bipolar disorder and most commonly associated with social phobia and major depressive disorder. Details here. . .

For this psychiatrist, group therapy has proved to be an extraordinarily effective treatment for a range of mental disorders.

How often do insomnia and anxiety disorders coexist? And how best to treat patients with comorbid insomnia and anxiety? Answers here..

Perinatal anxiety disorders are common and pose risks to women and their offspring. Here, Laura Miller, MD, speaks briefly on panic disorder, PTSD, and OCD during pregnancy and post-partum, and she offers strategies for crafting effective treatment plans.

This psychiatrist was not prepared for the scope of impact our two long wars have had on military children.

Depression, PTSD, panic disorder, and abuse of alcohol and drugs are more insidious, quieter forms of illness that can cause the same desperation and disability as psychotic disorders.

Anxiety disorders are a frequent occurrence in pregnancy. While some worries and anxiety are experienced by more than 50% of pregnant women, a full-blown anxiety disorder involves risk to both mother and fetus and increases the risk of postpartum depression.

Anxiety disorders occur in 18% to 28% of the US general population during any 12-month period. In anxiety disorder, there is a 33% to 45% 12-month prevalence rate for a comorbid substance use disorder (SUD).

In this article, we attempt to leverage state-of-the-art research findings to provide empirically informed perspectives and practices related to these issues.

Exposure-based therapies are highly effective for patients with anxiety disorders, to the extent that exposure should be considered a first-line, evidence-based treatment for such patients. In clinical practice, however, these treatments are underutilized, which highlights the need for additional dissemination and training.

Treatment of anxiety can be a challenge, since the mainstay of treatment may adversely affect the course of bipolar disorder.

In 2009, Maj Matthew P. Houseal, a psychiatrist, was in Iraq attempting to help suicidal soldiers when a fellow soldier killed him, a clinical social worker and 3 others at a combat stress center near Bagdad. Paradoxically, Houseal’s accused killer, US Army Sgt John Russell, had earlier threatened to take his own life, according to witnesses’ testimony during a recent investigative Article 32 hearing.

Most military families successfully adapt to a service member's deployments for military duties. Nevertheless, almost a decade of wartime stress associated with the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has presented unprecedented challenges for military families.

The United States has often been characterized as a nation of hypochondriacs. This is patently not true but TV bombardment by pharmaceutical advertisements stirs anxiety and illness fears in the many worried well in our midst.

Patients with anxiety disorders who self-medicate with alcohol or drugs may be increasing their risk for developing incident substance use disorders, according to a study presented at the American Psychiatric Association’s recent annual meeting.

The thing to remember that there is not a pill for every worry or life problem and that pills can sometimes make things worse.

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.

Contrary to the popular belief that quitting increases anxiety, a recent study reports that stopping smoking can lift depression, decrease anxiety, and give quitters a sense of accomplishment during the period of abstinence.

Do patients with the personality trait alexithymia have trouble understanding the written language? What percentage of patients with dementia have at least one psychiatric comorbidity? These and more in this quiz.

The latest information released by the US Army reveals that last year American soldiers attempted suicide at the rate of about 5 /day. There were 160 successful suicides last year and during June the rate was 1/day. Military research has reported that one in 10 Iraq veterans may develop a severe case of PTSD.

Consider the predicament of Mrs M-a 38-year old premenopausal mother of two. Mrs M tells her primary care physician, “I just don’t have a strong desire for sex."

Insurance restrictions sometimes make for strange bedfellows. My story begins with a phone call from a man about to lose his job. He said that he had been placed on probation and was about to be fired. He asked if he could see me. We met the following day.

It is safe to say that few authors of mental health–related books would introduce themselves by presenting these credentials:

Allen Frances, MD, identifies a number of concerns about the draft DSM5 revisions.1 Not mentioned in his commentary, but of significant concern, is a proposal that might subsume tic disorders under a new category called “Anxiety and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders.”