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Antidepressants: What You Need to Know to Best Serve Your Clients

In case you missed it, here are the highlights from my recent national webinar entitled: Antidepressants. What You Need to Know to Best Serve Your Clients. No one antidepressant or antidepressant class consistently outperforms another from an efficacy standpoint. There are no shining stars, just lights in the sky. With antidepressants treatment, there is no right way or wrong way, only possibilities. Just get the client started on a regimen. Actions among antidepressants are different. Typically, for the depressed, agitated, [...]

2012-11-12T14:07:43+00:00
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Anxiety Disorder Updates

There’s nothing new to report about anxiety itself. That’s because it’s a normal human response; some of us experience it intermittently, other chronically. Most of the attention in this class of disorders is on PTSD and OCD. PTSD has aroused debate especially surrounding the definition of the traumatic event that anchors the symptoms. It is not controversial that intense traumatic events qualify as criterion, but what about purely psychosocial events without physical injury? DSM IV does not require that someone [...]

2017-01-29T15:41:02+00:00
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Bipolar Disorder Updates

From a diagnostic perspective, bipolar disorder is complex, highly nuanced and does not lend itself to black-or-white judgments. As a profession, we are in transition to a different diagnostic system known as the “bipolarity index.” This index will focus on a series of manic and non-manic bipolar markers scored on a point system, eschewing the oversimplified yes-or-no categorical system of the DSM. The diagnosis of bipolar disorder in children and adolescents is currently the most hotly debated issue in pediatric [...]

2017-01-29T15:40:45+00:00
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Schizophrenia Updates

Natural History, What Gets Better, What Doesn’t Approximately 85 percent of older adults with schizophrenia live in communities with support, 13 percent reside in nursing homes, one percent in state or county hospitals and 0.5 percent in veterans hospitals. Positive symptoms (delusions, hallucinations, disorganization) improve with age. Negative symptoms (apathy, anhedonia, avolition) also improve with age. Cognitive symptoms (incoherence, loose associations, informational processing impairment) worsen with age. Quality of life in adults with major mental illness such as schizophrenia is [...]

2017-01-29T15:40:20+00:00
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ADD Updates

Attention Deficit Disorder is being overdiagnosed and underdiagnosed. Overdiagnosis is a by-product of rising academic expectations. American children are expected to sit longer, concentrate more, and read and write earlier than ever before. Children are rushed from one activity to another. All these factors contribute to a child not focusing and paying attention. Underdiagnosis results when a youngster is labeled as a “bad child” and the accompanying ADD behaviors are seen as purposeful and under the child’s control. It’s the [...]

2017-01-29T15:40:08+00:00
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Drugmakers to Pool Data in Psychiatric Medication Research

Demystifying the workings of the brain have proven to be a far more daunting task for pharmaceutical companies whose bread and butter rely upon the research and development of new psychotropics. As a result, nine major pharmaceutical companies have agreed to pool data on drug trials in an effort to streamline the methodology for formulating new medications to treat psychiatric disorders. This collaboration, which unites Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Eli Lilly, Roche and others, will co-mingle findings on 67 trials regarding 11 [...]

2017-01-29T15:38:28+00:00
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Regular Physical Activity and Mental Health Benefits – Context Matters!

Individuals who engage in regular physical activity – regardless of intensity – are less likely to experience symptoms of depression, according to new research published in the November issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry. Of particular importance, researchers studying this issue found that this physical activity needs to be taken in people’s leisure time if they are to reap the benefits. The study demonstrated that those who exert themselves during working hours, by doing lots of walking or lifting [...]

2011-06-30T14:51:03+00:00
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Teens and Depression Relapse

Approximately 50 percent of teens treated for depression will relapse within a five year period, according to a new study conducted by Duke University. A research team from Duke’s Department of Behavioral Sciences conducted a study of 86 boys and 110 girls with a mean age of 14 who had taken part in a previous trial which had been divided into four groups: Prozac (fluoxetine) alone, CBT alone, fluoxetine and therapy, or placebo. The researchers found that regardless of which [...]

2011-06-30T14:51:54+00:00
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Temper Dysregulation with Dysphoria…The Best Laid Plans

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” remember this old saying? Sometimes we spot a serious problem, and with the best of intentions, discover that our solution wreaks as much havoc as the original problem itself. The writers of DSM 5 have identified what they believe to be a very troublesome problem – the seemingly out-of-control overdiagnosis of childhood bipolar disorder which had led to a veritable proliferation of antipsychotic and mood-stabilizer medication use in pediatric populations. I [...]

2017-01-29T15:38:42+00:00
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A Real-World View of Depression Treatment

It appears that most Americans take the easy way out when it comes to the treatment of depression. Given a choice between talk therapy and taking an antidepressant, the medication wins out. This is one of the key findings of a survey of 1500 readers of Consumer Reports who had sought medical help for depression and/or anxiety between January 2006 and April 2009. Nearly 80 percent of these respondents had received a prescription for an antidepressant after their diagnosis of [...]

2011-06-30T14:54:35+00:00
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