psychiatry

More wheels coming off the bus. Research Center Tied to Drug Company - NYTimes.com: By GARDINER HARRIS Published: November 24, 2008 When a Congressional investigation revealed in June that Dr. Joseph Biederman, a world-renowned child psychiatrist, had earned far more money from drug makers than he had reported to his university, he said that his interests were "solely in the advancement of medical treatment through rigorous and objective study." But e-mail messages and internal documents from Johnson & Johnson made public in a court filing reveal that Dr. Biederman pushed the company to…
This is from an interesting open-access article in Annals of General Psychiatry.  It describes two studies, relating to two different catastrophic events.  The authors examine the differences in how various risk factors may contribute to the development of PTSD in persons of each gender. href="http://www.annals-general-psychiatry.com/content/7/1/24/abstract">Risk factors predict post-traumatic stress disorder differently in men and womenDorte M. Christiansen,Ask ElklitAnnals of General Psychiatry 2008, 7:24doi:10.1186/1744-859X-7-2418 November 2008 Background About twice as many women…
This is an image of a human brain.  It is constructed using an imaging method known as diffusion spectrum imaging.  The technique has been discussed at href="http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2008/07/hi_res_brain_topology_map.php">Neurophilosophy and href="http://anthropology.net/2008/07/01/diffusion-spectrum-imaging-used-to-map-the-structural-core-of-human-cerebral-cortex/">Anthropology.net; both posts were based upon a paper in href="http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0060159">PLOS Biology. The image above is…
The Archives of General Psychiatry has an open-access article about bipolar disorder in childhood ( href="http://archpsyc.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/65/10/1125">Child Bipolar I Disorder).  I started to write about that.  But then, as often happens, I stumbled upon something else. The LA Times has a consumer-oriented href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-sci-bipolar11-2008oct11,0,5539685.story">article about the journal article.  It is one of those OK-level news articles.  One glaring error: the author cites the "Archives of General Psychology," which is the wrong…
This is a peculiar article: href="http://www.annals-general-psychiatry.com/content/7/1/16/abstract">Costs and effects of paliperidone extended release compared with alternative oral antipsychotic agents in patients with schizophrenia in Greece: A cost effectiveness study.  It's a open-access article in the Annals of General Psychiatry, dated 28 August, 2008. (Annals of General Psychiatry 2008, 7:16 doi:10.1186/1744-859X-7-16) Background To compare the costs and effects of paliperidone extended release (ER), a new pharmaceutical treatment for the management of schizophrenia, with the most…
Ever since the inception of the Global and Perpetual War on Terror, there has been concern about the role of professionals with training in psychology and psychiatry in the design, conduct, and interpretation of torture programs. The American Psychiatric Association (APA) banned such participation in May 2006.  The American Medical Association (AMA) followed a few weeks later. These associations do not have any regulatory authority.  Nonetheless, their proclamations and highly influential.  Oddly, the American Psychological Association [the other APA, call it AP'A, (p-prime)] did not follow…
The economic crisis is reported to be responsible for a recent increase in calls for mental health services: href="http://delawareonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080920/BUSINESS/809200314">Economy worries driving more people to seek help By ROB WATERS and DAVID OLMOS September 20, 2008 A tidal wave of anxiety is washing over America, from Wall Street's concrete canyons to the lettuce fields of California, propelled by the mortgage industry collapse, high gas prices, tight credit and rising unemployment. Operators of telephone help lines, insurers, hospital administrators and…
One important concept in psychotherapy studies is the concept of href="http://www.indiana.edu/%7Efamlygrf/units/ambiguous.html">ambiguous loss.  This is a loss that is, in some way, less than definitive.  If you are at the hospital visiting an ill beloved family member, and see the death, it is perfectly clear that a specific loved one has in fact died.  If you are mature enough to grasp the permanence of the loss, is it unambiguous. Many losses, however, are ambiguous.  Examples include infertility, when the loss is a loss of opportunity, as opposed to the loss of a specific person; a…
Hallucinations are often associated with psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia or with LSD and related drugs. Hearing voices is a characteristic symptom which is reported by about 70% of schizophrenic patients, as well as by some 15% of patients with mood disorders such as depression; and those under the influence of LSD often experience extreme spatial distortions and surreal visions. Most common are auditory and visual hallucinations, but the other senses can also produce mirages. Temporal lobe epilepsy or brain injury can lead to phantosmia, or olfactory hallucinations, during…
href="http://www.researchblogging.org"> alt="ResearchBlogging.org" src="http://www.researchblogging.org/public/citation_icons/rb2_large_gray.png" style="border: 0pt none ;"> href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_brain_stimulation" rel="tag">Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) currently is under investigation for treatment of sever, treatment-resistant depression (TRD).  It is not really news.  I href="http://trots.blogspot.com/2005/03/implantable-devices-for-major.html">wrote about it in 2005.  The background information in the earlier post still is pertinent, so I won't…
There have been many collections and compendia of artistic works by persons with psychiatric illness.  They are interesting.  In fact, it was a chance encounter with such a book that first got me interested in psychology. Thre is a story there, which I won't tell here, other than to say that it is a good argument for supporting public libraries.  Bored teenagers in a new town are better off in a library than in other places they might end up. Anyway, now I encounter the art-psychiatry connection again, but with a twist.  Rather that art produced by the patient, it is art produced by a doctor…
I chose three articles from this month's edition of Archives of General Psychiatry, upon which to comment.   For those not familiar with it, Arch Gen Psychiatry is an AMA journal, like JAMA, but for psychiatrists.  It's an influential journal. 1. href="http://archpsyc.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/65/8/870">Selecting Among Second-Step Antidepressant Medication Monotherapies.  This is their one open-access article, so I will mention it first.  A little background: We've known for a long time that all antidepressants work for some people, but nothing works for everyone.  A lot of effort…
This is a nice little case report from the European Journal of Psychiatry.  The translation is a little rough, but the information is good. href="http://scielo.isciii.es/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0213-61632007000400006&lng=es&nrm=iso&tlng=en"> href="http://scielo.isciii.es/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0213-61632007000400006&lng=es&nrm=iso&tlng=en">Neuroleptic malignant syndrome: Possible relationship between Neuroleptic Treatment And Smoking CessationMª José MartÃn Vázquez PhD MPsych*, Teresa Jimeno Beltrán MD**Eur. J. Psychiat. v.21…
tags: bipolar disorder, manic depression, mental illness, psychiatry, suicide, audioblog Image: Myself43. A friend sent me this interesting link to an audio piece that recently appeared in the NYTimes about bipolar disorder. This piece may help those with the disorder to feel less alone and help those who love someone with the disorder to get a better understanding of what it is like to live with it. It's not very long, and it's well worth listening to.
href="http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/restless_legs/restless_legs.htm">Restless Legs Syndrome has been more in the public eye lately.  I understand this is because of aggressive direct-to-consumer advertising.  I'm not much of a consumer, so I haven't seen the ads, but people tell me about them.   Whatever you think of DTC advertising, RLS is real, and it is a significant problem for some people.   Years ago, it was discovered that RLS can be alleviated for some people with carbidopa/levodopa.  But that was an off-patent medicine.  When patented medicines [Requip (ropinirole) and…
This post is not about mental health parity.  Although it is a very important topic, there is no reason for me to write about it.  If you are interesting in the topic, just go read the (open access) Perspectives column in the current NEJM: href="http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/359/2/113">Shuffling toward Parity -- Bringing Mental Health Care under the Umbrella. The column is short enough that there would not be any point in trying to distill it any further.  But I do want to make a couple of points, including a mild-to-moderate quibble with one of the points mentioned: Insurers…
Joshua Wolf and Robert Salo of Melbourne's Royal Children's Hospital reported, in the href="http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title%7Edb=all%7Econtent=t768481832%7Etab=issueslist">Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, on a case of a person with delusional beliefs regarding climate change. There is no openly-accessible abstract, (the link to the paywall page is href="http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content%7Econtent=a791365692%7Edb=all%7Eorder=page">here) so we have to make do with href="http://www.anorak.co.uk/global-warming/185486.html">a news report: We describe a…
Sometimes  I see news about upcoming drugs, and hope that it works out.  Sometimes, I don't see the point.  Rarely, I actively hope that it does not work out.  Staccato® alprazolam is one that I hope does not work out.   It's a form of href="http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/druginfo/medmaster/a684001.html">alprazolam (Xanax®) that goes in an inhaler.  It is heated by a little electrical circuit, vaporized, then inhaled.  The idea it to give it a faster onset of action. Why? First, a little background.  Alprazolam is a member of the href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benzodiazepine…
In 1965, Senator Robert Kennedy visited several "institutions for the mentally retarded" in New York State. His descriptions of the conditions he found there, which were published widely in the media, shocked the American public and angered those in charge of the institutions. Later that year, Dr. Burton Blatt visited five such institutions in the eastern states, with his photographer friend Fred Kaplan, who, armed with a hidden camera attached to his belt, took hundreds of photographs of their "darkest corridors and vestibules". The result was a remarkable document called Christmas In…
This week's issue of Time has a cover story called America's Medicated Army, about the increasing use of antidepressant and anti-anxiety drugs among U.S. troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. The article quotes figures from a recent report by the Army's Mental Health Advisory Team, according to which, 12% of troops in Iraq, and 18% of those in Afghanistan, have been prescribed these medications (that is, approximately 20,000 of the total number of troops deployed). A study of British troops published last year showed that the longer troops are deployed, the more likely they are to suffer…