April 8th 2024
How can consulting psychiatrists help the team provide culturally appropriate care for diverse patient populations?
Clinical Consultations™: Considerations for Customizing Care Plans for Patients with Parkinson Disease Psychosis
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Advances In™ Schizophrenia: Expanding the Therapeutic Landscape
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Expert Illustrations & Commentaries™: Visualizing New Therapeutic Targets in Schizophrenia
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Southern California Psychiatry Conference
September 13-14, 2024
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Updates on New and Emerging Therapies to Improve Outcomes for Patients With Major Depressive Disorder
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5th Annual International Congress on the Future of Neurology®
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2023 Annual Psychiatric Times™ World CME Conference
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Clinical Consultations™: Managing Depressive Episodes in Patients with Bipolar Disorder Type II
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Medical Crossfire®: Understanding the Advances in Bipolar Disease Treatment—A Comprehensive Look at Treatment Selection Strategies
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Patient, Provider, and Caregiver Connection™: Exploring Unmet Needs In Postpartum Depression – Making the Case for Early Detection and Novel Treatments
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'REEL’ Time Patient Counseling: The Diagnostic and Treatment Journey for Patients With Bipolar Disorder Type II – From Primary to Specialty Care
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Real Psychiatry 2025
January 2025 - Exact Date TBA
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More Than ‘Blue’ After Birth: Managing Diagnosis and Treatment of Post-Partum Depression
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Patient, Provider & Caregiver Connection™: Reducing the Burden of Parkinson Disease Psychosis with Personalized Management Plans
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Cultural Considerations in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
January 11th 2010The onset of psychiatric illness in a child is a life-changing event for families. Families from immigrant and ethnocultural communities often must come to an understanding of their child’s psychiatric difficulties while simultaneously interacting with an unfamiliar health care system and its practitioners.
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Introduction: Cross-Cultural Psychiatry
January 10th 2010During the past 2 decades, there has been enormous growth of interest in and visibility of cultural psychiatry. Much of this is due to the steady increase in migration of the world’s population from low-income to higher-income regions and countries.
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Religion, Spirituality, and Mental Health
January 10th 2010Until the early 19th century, psychiatry and religion were closely connected. Religious institutions were responsible for the care of the mentally ill. A major change occurred when Charcot1 and his pupil Freud2 associated religion with hysteria and neurosis. This created a divide between religion and mental health care, which has continued until recently. Psychiatry has a long tradition of dismissing and attacking religious experience. Religion has often been seen by mental health professionals in Western societies as irrational, outdated, and dependency forming and has been viewed to result in emotional instability.3
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Living the Questions: Cases in Psychiatric Ethics
November 3rd 2009Information transmission, such as blogs, RSS feeds, and podcasts, have emerged as common forms of communication. The exponential growth of medical knowledge and the increasingly rapid pace of scientific discovery have made it nearly impossible for the print medium to keep abreast of new developments.
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Doctor: Are You “Drugging” or “Medicating” Your Patients?
October 29th 2009You have read the blogs and seen the placards a dozen times: doctors prescribe too many “drugs” for too many patients. Psychiatrists, in particular, are popular targets of politically motivated language that seeks to conflate the words “medication” and “drug”-thereby tapping into the public’s understandable fears concerning “drug abuse” and its need to carry out a “War on Drugs.”
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Twitter and YouTube: Unexpected Consequences of the Self-Esteem Movement?
October 28th 2009To Americans over 30, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter are buzzwords that lack much meaning. But to those born between 1982 and 2001-often referred to as “millennials” or “Generation Y”-they are a part of everyday life. For the uninitiated, these Web sites are used for social networking and communication. They are also places where individuals can post pictures and news about themselves and express their opinions on everything from music to movies to politics. Some sites, such as YouTube, allow individuals to post videos of themselves, often creating enough “buzz” to drive hundreds and even thousands of viewers; in some instances, these videos create instant media stars-such as the Obama imitator, Iman Crosson.
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Those who know Sacha Baron Cohen will tell you he is nothing like Brüno or the other characters he impersonates. The third son of an orthodox Jewish family, he grew up in a suburb of London, went to fancy British schools, and spent a year living in Israel. He read history at Christ’s College, Cambridge, where an interest in the role of American Jews in the Civil Rights Movement led to his thesis on the 1964 murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in Mississippi. Not the biography of a man you would imagine inventing Ali G, an American ghetto rapper; or Borat, an anti-Semitic TV reporter from Kazakhstan; or Brüno, a gay Austrian fashionista who wants to be as famous as that other Austrian, Adolf Hitler. These characters have made Baron Cohen one of the preeminent icons of popular culture.
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Advice To DSM V. . .Change Deadlines And Text, Keep Criteria Stable
August 27th 2009There is no magic moment when it becomes clear that the world needs a new edition of the DSM. With just one exception, the publication dates of all previous DSM’s were determined by the appearance of new revisions of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD). Thus, DSM-I appeared in conjunction with ICD-6 in 1952; DSM-II with ICD-8 in 1968; DSM-III with ICD-9 in 1980; and DSM-IV with ICD-10 in 1994. The lone exception was DSM-IIII-R, which appeared in 1987-out of cycle only because it was originally meant to be no more than a minor revision. The official publication date for DSM-V is May 2012. That date was picked to be consistent with an earlier, no longer correct, expectation that ICD-11 would be published in that same year.
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I appreciate Drs Spitzer and Frances’ prompt response to my article, which was published in the July issue of Psychiatric Times. I also thank them for their good wishes and thoughts about what we are doing as members of the DSM-V workgroups-membership whose rules we all knew and freely accepted.
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PTSD Is a Valid Diagnosis: Who Benefits From Challenging Its Existence?
July 10th 2009PTSD filled a nosological gap by providing a way to characterize the long-lasting effects of trauma exposure.1 This led to a plethora of previously lacking scientific observations. Now the existence of PTSD is being called into question because some of the original assumptions that helped make the case for it have proved to be incorrect.2-4 However, it is possible to update some of the flawed assumptions of PTSD without rescinding the diagnosis. There is no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
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Inside the DSM-V Process: Issues, Debates, and Reflections
July 6th 2009Being a member of 1 of the 13 working groups of the DSM-V Task Force is, indeed, a unique experience. Having a large number of respected colleagues working diligently on areas that they have mastered with indisputable authority over the years is an intellectually fascinating experience.
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Der Spiegel has anointed Fatih Akin the new face of the German film industry. Of Turkish descent, Akin has no interest in the ghosts of Germany’s past or in facing history through films such as The Reader-which still attract large audiences and Oscar nominations in America. Akin finds his inspiration in the new Europe and in the lives of people like himself who are the rising generation of Europe’s immigrants.
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Despite their severe physical impairment, disability, and frequent medical complications, tetraplegic patients reported a very positive outlook on life, according to a recent study. In another, 63% of major lottery winners chose to continue working full-time at their same jobs.
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Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy in Severe Mental Illness
April 17th 2009Psychotropic treatment can often prevent the relapse of psychotic and mood symptoms. However, many patients take medication intermittently or not at all; or the symptoms may be only partially responsive to medication. Therefore, there is a need for interventions that can supplement the effect of medication and improve treatment outcomes.
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Lord, protect me from all the institutions that want to guard me from harm-Congress, PhRMA, academics, journal publishers, and even my APA. They fear I will be brainwashed. They fear-heaven forefend- I may use drugs “off-label.” I hesitate to inform you-it’s too late! I already prescribe medications offlabel, and I do it every day.
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The New Historical Trauma Studies
March 11th 2009Recent decades have seen an outpouring of publications about psychological trauma. With its formal diagnostic category of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Western psychiatric medicine has led the way in opening up this field of study. Many other disciplines of inquiry, including sociology, anthropology, legal studies, and literary studies, also have contributed their distinctive approaches and methodologies to the subject. Most recently, professional historians in Britain, Germany, Austria, Australia, Canada, and the United States have researched the origins of PTSD to great effect. These “new historical trauma studies” draw heavily on pioneering medical research from earlier places and periods. In addition, empirical findings from and analytical insights into humanity’s troubled, traumatic past provide ideas, observations, and insights that may be useful for mental health practitioners today.
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When in Rome . . . Museo della Mente
December 1st 2008A revamped museum in Italy is providing a hands-on and heads-on approach to mental illness. The Museo della Mente (Mind's Museum), which originally opened in 2000, is located on the outskirts of Rome in a former psychiatric hospital that closed in 1978
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The Facts About Violence Against Historically Disadvantaged Persons
Racial/ethnic and sexual orientation minorities and women historically have been relegated to social, legal, and economic disadvantage in the United States.
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NIMH Plans Accelerating Research to Remedies
October 1st 2008A strategic plan to guide research priorities and resource allocations of the NIMH was released recently by NIMH Director, Thomas R. Insel, MD. The plan is intended to provide direction over the next 5 years toward the institute’s stated vision of “a world in which mental illnesses are prevented and cured.”
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Doing Psychiatry Wrong Author Responds to Critique
September 2nd 2008In his review of my book, Doing Psychiatry Wrong: A Critical and Prescriptive Look at a Faltering Profession (Psychiatric Times, June 2008, page 57), S.N. Ghaemi, MD, MPH, citing George Orwell, writes that I “seek to justify an opinion” rather than “seek the truth.” He claims that my “errors are numerous and fundamental.”
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Intimate Partner Violence: Practical Issues for Psychiatrists
August 2nd 2008The term “domestic violence” emerged in the United States with the rise of the women’s movement in the 1970s. Before that, violence between partners was considered a private matter. A specific type of domestic violence, intimate partner violence, refers to violence between intimate partners. Public awareness campaigns help us identify one type of intimate partner violence in which one partner, typically the male partner, is the aggressor, and the other partner, typically the female, is the victim.
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he key manifestations of DSM-IV somatoform disorder are unexplained physical symptoms or complaints that tend to coexist with other psychiatric syndromes or are linked to psychological issues. These symptoms typically lead to repeated medical or emergency department visits; are associated with serious discomfort, dysfunction, and disability; and lead to significant health expenditures.
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Demystifying Love: Plain Talk for the Mental Health Professional
July 2nd 2008Although Demystifying Love: Plain Talk for the Mental Health Professional is economy-sized at 200 pages, the book is a useful attempt by the well-known psychiatrist and sex therapist Stephen Levine to condense a lifetime of knowledge from clinical practice, personal growth, and extensive reading about a complex subject. Not surprisingly, his case vignettes remain uppermost in the memory while the whirlwind tour of the many meanings of love, processes of getting into and out of love, erotic transference, psychological intimacy, and sexual desire gets a bit blurry
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Contemporary Western psychiatry subsumes diverse perspectives on the so-called mind-body problem, but there is still no consensus on a single best or most complete explanatory model of mind-body interactions. Western psychiatry describes brain function in terms of dynamic properties of neurotransmitters and electromagnetic energy fields.
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Reframing ADHD in the Genomic Era
June 2nd 2008In the era of genomics, psychiatry-like all areas of medicine-will likely undergo radical change. As genetic risk factors are uncovered and the dynamic nature of gene expression is elucidated, novel approaches to prevention will diminish or preempt diagnosis and treatment for many psychiatric and neurobehavioral disorders.
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