Cultural Psychiatry

Emergency departments are often forced to hold patients who are acutely dangerous to themselves or others for long periods until an inpatient bed can be obtained.

This article highlights several features of medical and social importance that are somewhat unique to the Somali refugee community in the US.

If historians have demonstrated anything, it is that psychiatry, clinical psychology, and psychotherapy cannot be neatly associated with any one particular kind of political ideology or movement.

At the very heart of psychiatry, people seem totally unconcerned about making claims that, for example, philosophers have never been able to prove.

Despite the need for mental health support, undocumented immigrants underutilize mental health services. Many endure traumatic experiences while emigrating that put them at psychological risk and once in the US, undocumented immigrants face multiple psychosocial stressors.

Psychiatric disorders in persons with intellectual disabilities are typically more severe and more difficult to diagnose than in the general population. Clearly, those who diagnose ID and treat patients with this condition face a number of challenges.

Despite its many challenges, rural psychiatry can be particularly rewarding because it allows an opportunity to provide much-needed care and the ability to be at the forefront of helping to close gaps in health care disparities.The privilege of being a true community resource and the ability to improve overall community mental health give meaningful purpose to the work of a rural psychiatrist.

Even as psychiatry advances and develops new clinical techniques and as behavioral health systems seek the means to be able to serve all people needing care, disparities in service persist. The articles in this Special Report examine the demographically hard-to-reach populations-the socially marginalized who require special outreach techniques.

We welcome your thoughts and insights about treatment approaches for patients whose sexual addiction takes the form of sexting.

If your practice or your advocacy efforts place you anywhere near people encountering the mental health system for the first time, please have a look at this book.

At the recent annual APA meeting, Dr Abraham Halpern was posthumously honored for the second annual Humanitarian Award by the American Association for Social Psychiatry. He was honored for his contributions to ethics, forensics, and advocacy of social issues.

A panel of experts at the APA Annual Meeting discussed how changes in DSM-5 may affect clinical practice. Highlights here.

You are invited to spend the next few minutes listening to what Dr Steven Moffic has to say about how the environment may be affecting your patients and what impact ecologically-related syndromes might have on psychiatry.

This psychiatrist has learned to ask if his Hmong patients have also consulted a shaman to help with their depressive symptoms and with their PTSD.

How often are you confronted with an ethical dilemma in your clinical practice? How comfortable-and how prepared-are you to deal with these issues? Those are just a few of the questions posed in the Psychiatric Times Ethics Survey-a survey that turned out to be the largest ever of its kind.

Come next year, psychiatrists will start seeing patients who have purchased new individual and small-group health plans on the state exchanges mandated by the Affordable Care Act.

Psychiatrists need to understand how living in violent families and neighborhoods increases the likelihood of trauma and the psychiatric sequelae associated with it as well as how to respond in the aftermath.

When attempting to incorporate resilience-building strategies into practice, it is worthwhile to note that resilience is a dynamic concept in which successful coping may mean a mixture of major real-life successes in the context of continuing difficulties.

The intense level of international interest in DSM-5 is a great surprise. Although DSM has become a research standard around the world, it is rarely used by clinicians outside the US and therefore poses a much lesser threat to their patients. So why all the prominent media coverage in countries outside of the US?

The ethical aim of psychiatry is the relief of suffering and incapacity.

All psychiatry, anywhere in the world, is American psychiatry. This is both good and bad.

Both clinicians and weather forecasters employ the same general process of information gathering, analysis, and reaching a conclusion.

Psychiatry residents can carve out a career in the area of psychiatry that interests them. If drawn to specialized topics, such as atypical bipolar disorder, club drugs, glutamate transporters, or genetic links to autism, then they should pursue those avenues.

In our time, it seems that the number of psychiatrists who believe in a God are increasing, parallel with the decreasing influence of Freud’s ideas.

Changes will mean patients will only be covered for psychiatrists’ services that include medical evaluation and management; CPT coding will not allow for coverage of psychotherapy as a separate and equal category for payment.