Cultural Psychiatry

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.

Historically, there has been conflict between psychiatry and religion.

Bringing the arts and humanities to psychiatry requires bringing these areas of study into our education, our research and our practice models.

Freud famously quipped: "The creative writer cannot evade the psychiatrist nor the psychiatrist the creative writer."

Research efforts for LGBT patients include creating innovative medical and mental health services that lead to the training of students and practitioners and promote the development of outreach strategies specific to today’s critical needs.

The news media has always been in the business of searching for "the right sort of madness" to capture the public's imagination.

Crucial changes occurred that will greatly influence the organization of services, reimbursement, and diagnosis. It even ended in an exclamation point, as the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut punctuated the need for improved mental healthcare services.

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?

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.

R.I.P. Rest Inspiring Psychiatrists. I am grateful for having known you.