Depression

BLOG: Esketamine represents the first psychedelic treatment approved by the FDA for a psychiatric condition.

BLOG: This year’s Psych Congress returned, time and again, to the theme of us needing to reconnect with a larger experience of the world in order to find a path out of depression.

BLOG: The logical endpoint of population-based screening for perinatal depression is remission of depression in those who screen positive. Otherwise screening is just an empty endeavor.

BLOG: Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and The Botany of Desire, has turned his spotlight of curiosity onto the subject of psychedelics with his new book How to Change Your Mind.

BLOG: On January 18, 2018, in Sacramento California, new mother Jessica Porten went to see a women’s health nurse practitioner. She was 4 months postpartum and had not been seen by her obstetric provider since giving birth.

BLOG: Recent qualitative studies on subjects treated with psilocybin may begin to help us understand the subjective experience caused by the drug that may lead to its antidepressant effects.

BLOG: We psychiatrists read so much about physicians being “difficult patients.” What about when the shoe is on the other foot?

BLOG: These studies were the latest findings showing that psychedelics, erroneously dismissed as mere intoxicants and swept up in the hysteria of the Nixon-era drug wars, could prove to be as important to psychiatry as penicillin was to infectious disease.

I’m in London interviewing loved ones of doctors who have ended their lives by suicide.

We need to get the message out that for every death by suicide there is a cohort of bereaved family members who themselves become ill and suicidal. They require — and deserve — our best diagnostic and treatment efforts.