As our US Military personnel face not only harm’s way in Afghanistan and Iraq, but repeated tours of duty, their families, dependents in military jargon, also face the difficulty of separation and anxiety and depression. Effective just hours ago, through TriWest, the Western US region of Tricare, the government provided health plan for eligible ...
Category Archives: Mental Health
Living With Cancer
This is a topic close to home. My wife was diagnosed with Stage 3C cancer of the ovary a bit over a year ago. She was a chemotherapy superstar, had few complications, and has been in remission since her treatment finished last October. Still we know her chances of a cure are fairly low. Understanding ...
30 Years of Progress – Antipsychotic Therapy
Last week I posted about the progress in the treatment of depression over the last 30 years. Today I’m going to discuss what I think is an even more dramatic improvement in pharmacologic management of psychiatric disease. The treatment of major psychosis, especially schizophrenia, but also bipolar disorder, has had revolutionary breakthroughs ...
Depression: It helps when the treatment is not worse than the disease
Fourth in the series of major breakthroughs in medical care in the last 30 years is the development of tolerable and effective treatment of depression. In my residency training from 1980-83 every resident dreaded seeing a patient with depression. The side effects of the medications we used were almost worse than the depression itself, and ...
Professional Victims
I often see patients in the office I think of as professional victims. They just seem to always have terrible luck. They make choices that might at face value seem fine, but seem to always work out poorly. Dr. Friedman in yesterday’s NY Times writes about a theory as to why these patients failure ...
Broken Hearts
An article in the NY Times by Ron Winslow gives an example of the ‘Broken Heart Syndrome” and a fair description of the pathophysiology of this condition. Basically it is a transient dysfunction of the entire pumping action of the heart associated with pain that can mimic a coronary occlusion and “Heart Attack.” ...
A Canadian perspective
Will Meek PhD, a Vancouver psychotherapist, posted to his blog a brilliant perspective on how to get past being fixated i n the past froma traumatic experience. He calls it “Remembering vs. Reliving.” I read this first after seeing the link on “Grand Rounds” at Dr. Rob Lambert’s blog “Musings of a Distractible ...
Drinking less your New Year’s resolution?
As we enter the New Year many of you have probably made a resolution. Mine is related to a previous post on not putting off having fun. Often these resolutions deal with getting more exercise, eating more, drinking less, or stopping smoking. I thought over the next few days I’d comment on each of these ...