Innovative Psychiatry
“Though I am often in the depth of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony, and music inside me.” —Vincent Van Gogh May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and I’ve been thinking about how to disrupt the stigma of “mental illness.” It’s a term I don’t like – but it’s still used throughout the world, […]
We celebrated Mother’s Day yesterday. What was it like for you? We truly hope you enjoyed a day of love and hugs as you celebrated with your children. But if you’re a mom who has lost a child, and especially if you’ve lost a child by suicide, this is a day that reminds you of […]
Originally published in Brain & Behavior Magazine, July 2017 An important discovery has been made at the University of Pittsburgh. It raises the prospect that there may be an entirely new way of relieving major depression in people who repeatedly have failed to respond to existing treatments—people at elevated risk for suicide whose lives are often unrelentingly dark […]
No Wonder Treatment Resistance Has Been Such a Mystery! Clue: Look in the Cerebral Spinal Fluid! A man in his forties, Greg had never experienced life without depression. Treating mood disorders didn’t seem to be his psychiatrist’s forte. (Oh boy…) At least not in his case. Every accomplishment, every failure, struggled for expression beneath the […]
In a world where things go wrong and people get sick, every once in awhile something comes along that makes things right again. I’m talking about something that’s so dramatic in its solutions we’re tempted to call it a “miracle.” But we won’t. We’ll call it a game-changer. Because IV ketamine treatment is changing history. […]
The anesthetic-cum-party drug restores the ability to make connections among brain cells. The Food and Drug Administration’s approval last month of a depression treatment based on ketamine generated headlines, in part, because the drug represents a completely new approach for dealing with a condition the World Health Organisation has labelled the leading cause of disability […]
“If I see far, it’s that I stand on the shoulders of giants.” If you find yourself feeling alone and forgotten in your symptoms, feeling that there’s no one who really cares, please let me emphasize that there are hundreds, even thousands, of neuroscience researchers, medical doctors with PhDs, biochemists, psychopharmacologists, and psychiatrists who have […]
Since low testosterone in men has long been presumed to accompany aging, it can be overlooked as a cause of TRD in young men. John had gained 75 lbs (!) through the stressful and exhausting project at work. He’d come to hate the way he looked. Co-workers had turned on each other, undercutting rather than […]
Ketamine appears to restore faulty connections between brain cells, according to research performed in mice. The anesthetic ketamine can relieve depression in hours and keep it at bay for a week or more. Now scientists have found hints about how ketamine works in the brain. In mice, the drug appears to quickly improve the functioning […]
A new study shows that weekly ketamine infusions are associated with continued and maintained reductions in depressive symptoms among patients with treatment-resistant depression. The findings, which are considered novel among studies assessing ketamine administration for patients with treatment-resistant depression, evidence the promising role the controversial drug could play in psychiatric care. A team of investigators, led […]