Psychiatry Update: March 2018

Mar 30, 2018

News from around the web includes reports on physician burnout, the effects of diet on brain inflammation, written exposure therapy for PTSD, Parkland, psychedelics, benzodiazepines, and social media to gauge mental health.

Physician Burnout Starts Early. Activity trackers provided real-time data for a pilot study that “gives the first objective evidence of the heavy toll a resident’s schedule can take on sleep, physical activity and mood.” It was found that “the effect of short sleep on mood was twice as large as mood’s effect on sleep.” Journal of General Internal Medicine • March 14, 2018 • Effects of Sleep, Physical Activity, and Shift Work on Daily Mood: a Prospective Mobile Monitoring Study of Medical Interns

You Really Are What You Eat. The first objective evidence of the heavy toll a resident’s schedule can take on sleep, physical activity and mood.” It was found that “the effect of short sleep on mood was twice as large as mood’s effect on sleep.” Journal of General Internal Medicine • March 14, 2018 • Effects of Sleep, Physical Activity, and Shift Work on Daily Mood: a Prospective Mobile Monitoring Study of Medical Interns

PTSD Treatment. Written exposure therapy was found to be as effective as cognitive processing therapy for the treatment of PTSD. JAMA Psychiatry • March 2018 • A Brief Exposure-Based Treatment vs Cognitive Processing Therapy for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: A Randomized Noninferiority Clinical Trial

Parkland. Fact checked reports of violence in mental illness dispels the correlation between the two. New York Times • February 16, 2018 • Checking Facts and Falsehoods About Gun Violence and Mental Illness After Parkland Shooting

Psychedelics. “Why Prozac and its ilk so often fail, and why the future of psychiatry might be psychedelics. The Atlantic • February 22, 2018 • The Frustrating Inadequacy of Antidepressants

A New Epidemic? “According to data from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, overdose deaths involving benzodiazepines increased from 1135 in 1999 to 8791 in 2015. Despite this trend, the adverse effects of benzodiazepine overuse, misuse, and addiction continue to go largely unnoticed. Three quarters of deaths involving benzodiazepines also involve an opioid,1 which may explain why, in the context of a widely recognized opioid problem, the harms associated with benzodiazepines have been overlooked.” New England Journal of Medicine • February 22, 2018 • Our Other Prescription Drug Problem

Scanning for Suicidality. “Your digital footprint - how often you post on social media, how quickly you scroll through your contacts, how frequently you check your phone late at night - could hold clues to your physical and mental health”-and opportunity for scams. New York Times • February 25, 2018 • How Companies Scour Our Digital Lives for Clues to Our Health