Articles related to MENTAL HEALTH

Mental health care professionals who prescribe or dispense to patients need to know the half-lives of the drugs that they prescribe, the half-lives of active metabolites — if any — how these half-lives may differ with individual patient characteristics, and how to use this knowledge to prescribe to best advantage.

The demand for mental health treatment soars alongside an ongoing physician shortage and an increase in physician burnout. What is the toll paid by the mental health experts? How do they see the issues and how are they dealing with them? Read the study analysis here.

There is plenty of psychological material that can be examined in the palliative care encounter, despite the fact that it is frequently practiced by doctors with backgrounds outside of mental health training. This case presentation and associated discussion to introduce the psychological aspects of palliative medicine to psychiatrists and psychotherapists is based on the palliative care consultation sought with the multiple objectives of alleviating a patient’s severe death anxiety and persistent dyspnea, as well as helping in the clarification of his end-of-life wishes.

Many traditional mental health treatments are now viewed as being risky, intrusive, and barbarous in comparison to modern science because healthcare has advanced significantly over time. Here are five of the most extreme treatments for mental illness in recorded history, along with an examination of how some of them influenced more reputable approaches used in modern therapies.

In what is thought to be the largest study to date of any type of ketamine treatment, the findings revealed that, after four sessions, 89 percent of participants reported improvement in their depression and/or anxiety symptoms. On the PHQ-9 or GAD-7 scale, 63 percent of participants saw a 50% or greater improvement. PHQ-9 remission rates were 32.6 percent and GAD-7 remission rates were 31.3 percent. Furthermore, at the end of the four weeks, 62 percent of patients who had suicidal ideation prior to treatment reported no suicidal ideation.

The potential link between insulin resistance and bipolar disorder is causing a “paradigm shift in psychiatry,” remarked Dr. Cynthia Calkinan, associate professor of psychiatry at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.