Major Depressive Disorder

A recent symposium brought together some of the nation’s leading experts to talk about promising advances in psychiatry and to address areas where progress has faltered.

Astrocytic signaling to adenosine receptors results in the robust reduction of depressive-like behaviors associated with sleep deprivation.

Major depression is a common chronic illness within the general US population. What is the approximate prevalence for MDD in the US population?

Can methylfolate play a role in the adjunctive treatment of patients with major depression? In this podcast, Rakesh Jain, MD, offers insights.

According to the CDC's latest published report, there were 38,364 suicides in the US in 2010-an average of 105 each day. Globally, an estimated 1 million suicides occur annually.

Mindfulness training is a viable treatment tool that rivals psychopharmaceutical agents for the treatment of addiction, anxiety, depression, and other psychiatric disorders.

Planck's Law of Generations: scientific change doesn't happen by changing minds, but by changing generations.

Movement abnormalities and psychiatric symptoms often overlap and exacerbate one another. Can psychopharmacological agents induce movement disorders?

A list of recent articles highlighting the complexity of psychiatric and systemic illness, both in terms of overlapping clinical presentation and in the degrees to which systemic illness and psychiatric illness affect each other.

Diabetes mellitus and depression symptoms are associated with with decreased self-care and less adherence to exercise, medications, smoking cessation, and eating a healthy diet.

The goal of this article is to improve recognition of comorbid psychiatric and movement disorders and to help the reader formulate a management strategy using a multidisciplinary approach.

There are several reasons for taking the ketamine findings with a substantial grain of salt.

People who weren't getting out of bed are getting up and doing productive things. They are re-engaging with their families, and they are focusing on things they want to accomplish before they die.

The issue of context and its relationship to disorderness extends well beyond panic attacks: it arises in nearly all psychiatric diagnoses not explicitly defined contextually.

Panic attacks are nearly always pathological and disordered states, even when they occur in an understandable context.

Borderline personality disorder typically coexists with depression, anxiety, and substance abuse. Symptoms of these conditions may lead the clinician to miss the diagnosis of personality disorder entirely. Careful diagnosis of BPD and comorbid disorders is the first step.

Migraine, particularly chronic migraine, as well as other chronic headaches, have high rates of comorbidity with mood and anxiety disorders.

The psychiatric aftermath of critical illness can involve emerging from the ICU with horrifying memories (of being tortured, raped, assaulted, or imprisoned).

The demands on physicians keep growing-they are not only responsible for assessment, diagnosis, and treatment, they are subject to all manner of related administrative and practice responsibilities. Not surprisingly, physicians are susceptible to burnout.

Few psychiatrists know about the phenomena involving delusional and hallucinatory experiences of patients who survive critical illnesses.

Patients with major depression or bipolar depression have a 20- to 26-fold increase of mortality rate over the general population. Suicidal behavior can be quite complex as well deadly. It should go without saying that psychotherapy is usually necessary in treating patients who have suicidal ideation or who have demonstrated such tendencies or actions. Frequently, it may be combined with medication and sometimes it is the treatment of choice without medication.

The evolution of deep brain stimulation for various neuropsychiatric disorders results from advances in structural and functional brain imaging, increased understanding of neurocircuitry of the brain, and improvements in neurosurgical techniques and equipment.

The DSM-5 will eliminate the bereavement exclusion in the diagnosis of major depressive disorder for 2 main reasons.

The changes in the newly approved DSM-5 loosen diagnosis and threaten to turn our current diagnostic inflation into diagnostic hyperinflation.

Medical colleagues routinely monitor patients with sphygmomanometers, peak flow meters, and glucometers. Similarly, psychiatrists can and should incorporate the use of screening tools to help with diagnosis and treatment management.