There has been a growing awareness in recent years of the importance of gender in medical treatment and research. While much past research in addiction focused on men, there is now recognition that biologic and psychosocial differences between men and women influence the prevalence, presentation, comorbidity, and treatment of substance use disorders.
Many abusers of methamphetamine in rural areas manufacture the drug for their personal use. These "mom-and-pop cooks" produce methamphetamine in and around homes where children are also living. This article provides an overview of the mental health of children whose parents abuse methamphetamine.
The world began to face the prospect of human cloning when the journal Nature published Dolly the sheep's "birth announcement" in the form of a letter authored by Wilmut and colleagues. But despite all the attention given the issue, including two presidential commissions, the psychological consequences of cloning have been little addressed.
One of the major concerns of health professionals working in the area of psychiatry is understanding the conditions under which patients adhere to prescribed treatments. While adherence is linked to some extent to the patients' comprehension of their illness, it is also a function of their social and demographic characteristics, such as age, social milieu, or sex. Another attribute also merits our attention, however: the patient's cultural affiliation and in particular, his or her religious background.
Analyzing data gathered in a 10-nation study of psychoses by the World Health Organization (WHO), Susser and Wanderling1 found that the incidence of nonaffective psychoses with acute onset and full recovery was about 10 times higher in premodern cultures than in modern cultures. Transient psychoses with full recovery were comparatively rare in modern cultures. Such a dramatic difference begs for explanation.
Psychotic symptoms--delusions, hallucinations, paranoia, thought disorder--are mostly attributed now to aberrations in brain structure and function.
The skin is the largest organ of the body and functions as a social, psychological, and metabolically active biologic interface between the individual and the environment.
Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a serious illness involving multiple symptoms and mal adaptive behaviors. According to DSM-IV, “the essential feature of borderline personality disorder is a pervasive pattern of instability of interpersonal relationships, self-image, and affects” (p. 650). This pervasive pattern of instability also applies to behaviors that are impulsive and potentially damaging, including excessive spending, sexual promiscuity, reckless driving, binge eating, and substance misuse.
Office management of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) differs in many important ways from ADHD management conducted in a research environment. In clinical trials, treatments and eligible patients are selected in advance by committees, patients are randomized to different management strategies, and both clinicians and pa tients are blinded to the treatments.
For patients with psychiatric illnesses, the treatment team today often consists of a psychotherapist, psychiatrist, and/or primary care physician-all of whom are motivated to achieve the same goals. These include full remission of symptoms; improvement and restoration of function, quality of life, and relationships; and the delay and preferably prevention of recurrence of symptoms.
The setting of a fast-paced emergency department (ED) or psychiatric emergency service makes it especially difficult to sensitively elicit and address an individual patient's needs and concerns. When considering the myriad differences in culture that come into play between a patient and a psychiatrist or other mental health care clinician, optimal diagnosis and treatment can be even more challenging, as the cases described here illustrate. The important influence of culture cannot be stressed enough. Taking the time to understand "where the patient is coming from" can prevent an already stressful, highly emotionally charged situation from becoming even more convoluted.
ChEIs Beneficially Affect REM Sleep in AD. Cholinesterase inhibitors (ChEIs) do not modify disturbances of sleep-wake rhythm or sleep continuity in patients with either Alzheimer disease (AD) or frontotemporal dementia (FTD), but they may have a beneficial effect on REM sleep, according to investigators from the University of Marburg in Germany.
The Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy Syndrome Association estimates that the CRPS affects between 200,000 and 1.2 million Americans. The underlying causes of the syndrome have yet to be defined, and no definitive diagnostic test exists even though CRPS was first described in the late 19th century by the neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell. Mitchell referred to the cluster of symptoms he noticed in some of the Civil War soldiers who were under his care as "causalgia.
The increase in youth violence and aggression in the past 50 years has been called an "epidemic." This epidemic has had a tremendous impact on society. From an economic and public health perspective, primary prevention of youth violence is obviously desirable.
Complaints of persistent memory loss in otherwise well-functioning individuals after recovery from a psychiatric illness through electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) are best viewed as a conversion reaction or a somatoform disorder. The Camelford experience is a model for the complaints of ECT's profound personal memory losses.
It was just over a generation ago that the routine combination of psychotherapy and drug therapy seemed impossible. Then, one meta-analysis found that combined treatment with psychotherapy and medication was found to be notably superior to either treatment alone.
As Americans' use of personal electronic devices increases, so too, do the controversies surrounding these now seemingly indispensable tools.
While some mental health services for adolescents allow self-referral, many require parental involvement. There is increasing evidence that working with the family and the child is important if only to increase compliance with medication and to tackle any comorbid difficulties.
Several forums at the May 2006 American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) addressed the issue of the gap between the number of investigational addiction treatment drugs and the few actually available on the market.
Adolescents reject their parents’ icons and seek out and empower their own. Antiheroes seem deliberately provocative, assailing almost every social convention of the adult generation, and parents often fear they are leading youth astray.
New findings in epidemiology, developmental psychiatry, and neuroscience offer the opportunity for a new perspective on the problems of juvenile delinquency and bring to bear the insights of modern psychiatry in the treatment and successful rehabilitation of juvenile offenders.
Research conducted over the past 30 years leads to the conclusion that televised violence does influence viewers' attitudes, values and behavior.
DSM-IV-TR emphasizes that patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) show a "instability of interpersonal relationships, self-image, and affects, and marked impulsivity beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts," and any five out of nine listed criteria must be present for the diagnosis to be made.
Because personality is shaped by experiences during childhood and adolescence, it is likely that mental disorders occurring during these years may have an influence on personality development.
Many highly regarded clinicians have built careers working with patients they believe to have dissociative identity disorder (DID). Other distinguished practitioners consider DID to be a bogus diagnostic tag.
