Psychiatry:
Dinah, writing at Shrink Rap, got mentioned in the Wall Steet Journal, of all places. Her post "My Therapist is a Creep" caught the attention of their health blogger, Scott Hensley....
Posted on May 4, 2008 11:07 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
“Doctors think, ‘Well, of course she’s depressed — she’s dying of breast cancer,’” he said. I do see that kind of response sometimes, not just with regard to terminally ill patients. The physician does not think the depression should be...
Posted on April 16, 2008 7:27 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
This is interesting because it illustrates nicely how psychopharmacology can be confusing. In this post, I try to show some of the ways in which this confusion can occur.
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Posted on April 4, 2008 7:54 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
GrrlScientist wrote a post last month about a potential genetic test for bipolar disorder. Read that first to get some background. Now, it turns out that a company is selling a testing kit that you can use yourself, in the...
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Posted on March 24, 2008 8:57 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
This item just appeared on the news tubes, and I thought I'd pass it along. Distinguishing signs of early dementia from depression is tricky Mar 24, 2008, 3:07 GMT Berlin - It's often difficult to differentiate between early stages...
Posted on March 24, 2008 7:31 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A reader pointed me to this article, by Miriam Axel-Lute, about the Nonsensical Gyrations that Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield (of New Jersey) is going through to try to avoid paying for health care: What’s Healthy? If you were an...
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Posted on March 20, 2008 7:45 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The LA Times has a story about the author's own struggle with panic disorder and agoraphobia. For a Paxil-free life, she'll take the long route It takes some time, but this student learns there's no quick fix for panic...
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Posted on March 7, 2008 9:08 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Hoisted from the comments: I find it particularly alarming that children are prescribed some of these drugs. How much is truly known about how various psychiatric drugs affect the development of the brain? If a fifteen-year-old is put on a...
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Posted on March 3, 2008 8:47 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Judith Warner has some insightful essays in the NYT column, pertaining to the long-raging question about whether psychiatric patients are overmedicated or undermedicated. One of the essays addresses the question directly: Overselling Overmedication Judith Warner February 14, 2008 ...In the...
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Posted on February 28, 2008 9:09 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I noticed while writing this, that the word numb, if modified by adding the suffix -er, becomes an entirely different word. Number does not convey the meaning of more numb. According to Answers.com, number is a adjective, with the root...
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Posted on February 11, 2008 9:14 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Zyprexa Adhera is a new formulation of Eli LIlly's antipsychotic medication, olanzapine. It contains the same active ingredient as the pills, but it is a long-acting injection. It is supposed to last two to four weeks. There is not a...
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Posted on February 7, 2008 8:02 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Usually I cringe when I see yet another newspaper article about suicide. But I always read them. This time, I did cringe, but needlessly. The article turned out to be OK. F.D.A. Requiring Suicide Studies in Drug Trials By GARDINER...
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Posted on January 25, 2008 7:33 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Sounds too good to be true. Perhaps it is. For one, there is only one published case. For another, it has to be injected near the spine in order to have this effect. The arthritis medication, etanercept (Enbrel®) has been...
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Posted on January 14, 2008 9:00 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Roche Molecular Diagnostics offers a test that can determine which type of genes a person has for enzymes that metabolize antidepressant medication. The test costs $ 300 to $400, and can be ordered by healthcare professionals, or by consumers. The...
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Posted on December 23, 2007 10:02 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I haven't gotten back to the "selection of antidepressants" series. Mostly that is because, alphabetically, the next one is supposed to be citalopram. While citalopram (Celexa™) is a perfectly fine antidepressant, it is kind of boring. So to spice...
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Posted on December 12, 2007 9:07 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
This case was written up in the NEJM, and made freely accessible. The image on the top left shows a brain scan taken three years earlier than the one on the top right. The other images show the cells...
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Posted on December 8, 2007 8:34 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
From an article in the Washington Post: Afterward, she stayed strong. She wasn't going to make the classic victim's mistake of blaming herself for provoking the attack. Mo, writing at Neurophilosophy, commented at length upon an article about the use...
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Posted on December 5, 2007 9:27 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The Washington Post has an interesting article, 'A Soldier's Officer', about an officer in Iraq who attempted suicide and endangered other personnel. The military is considering putting her on trial for "assault on a superior commissioned officer, aggravated assault, kidnapping,...
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Posted on December 3, 2007 8:10 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Agomelatine is a new chemical entity that is nearing approval for treatment of depression. It was developed by Servier Laboratories; they have entered into an agreement with Novartis for commercialization of the product (Valdoxan®). This represents a new approach to...
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Posted on November 25, 2007 8:28 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
It is common for tension to occur in the doctor-patient relationship occurs when the patient reports symptoms that are distressing to the patient, but which do not seem serious to the doctor. Each instance of this is different, so it...
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Posted on November 19, 2007 5:25 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Simon N. Young, PhD, the Editor-in-chief of the Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, has written an editorial: How To Increase Serotonin In The Human Brain Without Drugs. In is published in this month's edition of the Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience....
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Posted on November 17, 2007 10:20 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The Department of Defense appears to be making a real effort to determine the scope of the problem. They now have published the results of a second screening of 88,235 returning soldiers. In their most recent study, they acknowledge that...
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Posted on November 14, 2007 12:56 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A recent study indicates that the lifetime cost of medical care for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans will be greater than the cost of the war to date. We really have no choice, but it is going to cost us. A...
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Posted on November 7, 2007 8:43 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The researchers did fMRI of brains of persons with Borderline Personality Disorder, before and after psychotherapy. This was a small study, using a design that would be difficult to use routinely, but it is provisionally interesting. Difficult, because the patients...
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Posted on November 6, 2007 8:25 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Anhedonia is one of the most important symptoms of depression. I wrote a post about it a while back, so I won't go into the definition in this post, other than to summarize by saying that it is the inability...
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Posted on November 3, 2007 2:01 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Nov. 5 event at U-M will feature top experts discussing alternatives to “criminalization” of America’s mentally ill ANN ARBOR, MI – Across America, prisons serve as an unofficial holding system for the mentally ill. Families desperate to get treatment...
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Posted on October 30, 2007 12:35 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Not much to add to this. I do want to make sure that more people see it. Why did you include a chapter on your bout with postpartum depression and were you concerned that the CIA would look unkindly on...
Posted on October 27, 2007 7:54 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
BMC Psychiatry, an open-access journal, has an article on Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD): Altered oscillatory brain dynamics after repeated traumatic stress. This is yet another indication that PTSD has an enduring physiological basis. The insula, as a site...
Posted on October 20, 2007 11:08 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The Treatment for Adolescents with Depression Study (TADS) is a major NIH-sponsored study of the treatment of adolescents with depression, in which fluoxetine-only, cognitive-behavioral therapy only, combination treatment, and placebo are compared. The study is expected to generate a number...
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Posted on October 16, 2007 1:41 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience (Canadian, bilingual), an open-access publication, has a regular column entitled Psychopharmacology for the Clinician (Psychopharmacologie pratique). Typically the column contains a case report and a brief discussion of practical issues in treatment. The...
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Posted on October 11, 2007 8:27 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Actually, the full headline is: Genetic test for suicidal ideation in patients using antidepressant drugs. A company called Neuromark has made available a genetic test that it claims can identify persons who would have an increased risk for suicide after...
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Posted on October 1, 2007 6:49 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
What is the world coming to? AJP has an article about "intensive" therapy for bipolar disorder. Their definition of intensive? Thirty sessions over a period of nine months. Back in the day, when you could struggle to stay awake during...
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Posted on September 8, 2007 6:43 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
In the 1950's, a new class of antipsychotic drugs was discovered: the antipsychotics. Chlorpromazine (Thorazine®) was the first. By the 1970's, several related compounds had been discovered. In 1976, it was learned that there is a direct linear relationship between...
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Posted on September 4, 2007 9:30 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Sexual assault is a common and serious problem. It is hypothesized that misconceptions (rape myths) may play a role in this. About 50% of sexual assaults involving adolescent or young adult female victims occur in the context of alcohol...
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Posted on August 29, 2007 8:53 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
This controversy has been evolving for the past three years. Perhaps at this point it is no longer newsworthy. But often, after a topic fades from the radar of the MSM, there are new findings. The journal, Psychological Medicine, has...
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Posted on August 25, 2007 2:13 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
This is from a small study, so it would be inappropriate to draw a broad conclusion from it. Still, it is kind of interesting. Bupropion in the Treatment of Outpatients with Asthma and Major Depressive Disorder E. Sherwood Brown, Lana...
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Posted on August 16, 2007 7:48 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
It is reasonably well established that treatment with bright light is effective for seasonal affective disorder (SAD). The standard treatment is to have someone expose their face to 10,000 Lux of bright light every morning, for 30 minutes, preferably at...
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Posted on August 10, 2007 11:01 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A while back, Shelly wrote a nice introduction to ADHD at Retrospectacle: The Neuroscience of ADHD. Read that first, for background, then consider this to be a minor addendum. There are still people who believe that ADHD is not real....
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Posted on August 10, 2007 9:50 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I happened to run across a couple of articles pertaining to cultural influences on mental health. Neither presented modern first-world culture in a positive light. The two articles are: Schizophrenia outcome measures in the wider international community; and A Longitudinal...
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Posted on August 3, 2007 8:06 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
PNAS has an open-access article describing the current state of knowledge of the genetics of autism. The authors looked at information from the Autism Genetic Resource Exchange and two other databases; one from the University of Michigan, the other...
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Posted on August 2, 2007 10:02 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
There is new information indicating that an oxytocin nasal spray could be used to treat shyness. Oxytocin is a peptide hormone best known for its role in childbirth and breastfeeding. These are known as peripheral actions, meaning they take...
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Posted on July 18, 2007 7:04 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
We already knew that varenicline could be used to help people stop smoking. Now there is a report that it can help reduce alcohol consumption, at least for rats. This was reported in PNAS (Varenicline, an α4β2 nicotinic acetylcholine receptor partial...
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Posted on July 15, 2007 11:05 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A couple of Parkinson's Disease related items came across the news wires, briefly. There are lessons in both of them, but both leave me with unresolved questions. The first one I noticed was a report based upon a journal...
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Posted on July 14, 2007 8:15 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
There is yet more information on the possible link between suicide and treatments for depression.
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Posted on July 10, 2007 11:28 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Insurance companies have discriminated against their mentally ill customers for years. Sadly, they have done so with t he comlicity of the Federal government. There have been many attempts to change this, but the attempts generally are made...
Posted on July 9, 2007 8:35 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
On June 21, 2007, the American Psychiatric Association issued a press release on the subject of video game addiction. Apparently, it had been rumored n the media that the APA was going to have a vote on whether to classify...
Posted on July 8, 2007 8:09 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
This is another post in a series detailing the selection of antidepressant medication. Use the "Antidepressants" link in the "Categories" part of the sidebar to find the other posts in the series. In this post, I am sort of assuming...
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Posted on July 3, 2007 1:41 PM • 17 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A recent study in the Archives of Internal Medicine caught my attention, because it has significant implications for stress management by physicians. The study also generated a bit of attention in the popular media. For example, this article in NYT:...
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Posted on June 29, 2007 8:08 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I suppose this is good, although it is too little too late. It would be a lot better to prevent these casualties in the first place. Army plans to hire more psychiatrists PAULINE JELINEK, Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON - Overwhelmed...
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Posted on June 15, 2007 10:21 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Why is it that recovering persons with alcoholism should not drink near-beer (beer with little or no alcohol)? ...Hank had been dry for several weeks thanks to a radical withdrawal program, but a simple walk past Pete's Tavern on...
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Posted on June 9, 2007 7:01 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
This is an interesting drug. Rarely prescribed, but interesting. It is older than what we typically give today. It is an antidepressant with a twist. In order to understand why it is interesting, you need to know a little...
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Posted on June 3, 2007 6:53 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
This post is about amitriptyline, one of the oldest antidepressants on the market in the USA. It also used to be the most widely-prescribed antidepressant. I've decided to not attempt an encyclopedic style of description of the pharmacological action of the...
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Posted on May 30, 2007 9:17 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Fast Company has an amusing and interesting article on pychopathy. Being a business-oriented magazine, they ask "Is your boss a psychopath?" But one could just as easily apply the same principles to other important people in your life, such...
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Posted on May 28, 2007 10:30 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I noticed the incidental coincidence of these two news items: Joseph Zuska, 93; Navy doctor developed treatment for alcoholism Gaps in Mental Care Persist for Fort Carson Soldiers The first item is an obituary for a Navy physician; the...
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Posted on May 25, 2007 12:01 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
This is in response to a comment from a prior post. There are a few related questions here. Can preemies develop PTSD, can they be labeled with PTSD, if they can get PTSD is it fundamentally the same as it...
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Posted on May 23, 2007 8:02 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
One of the things that most consistently surprised me, when I was doing the consultation-liaison rotation in residency, was how common delirium was, and how frequently it was missed by the medical team. Even since then, it has...
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Posted on May 21, 2007 8:15 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
