Depressed patients often do not respond to there first antidepressant or have to quit the antidepressant due to side effects. Switching to another antidepressant is often a solution. Nevertheless switching from one to the other depressant can be difficult. How do you switch, which taper scheme and which built up scheme do you use. How is this influenced by the cytochrome P450 system? Since recent there's a table on a website with most, if not all possible switches from one to the other antidepressant: www.switchingantidepressants.eu. It's a Wiki made by Drs. Walter Broekema, a pharmacist in a large psychiatric hospital in .....read more »

The organizers of REshape 2009, the second Health 2.0 conference and the first international E-Mental Health summit have set up an interesting contest, called the Dutch Open Health 2.0 Challenge, that will run during that week, from Oct. 12 to 15, with winners announced Oct. 16. Lee Aase, living in Austin, Minnesota who works for Mayo Clinic as manager for Syndications and Social Media will be presenting on both conferences and participating in this challenge with a Mayo team.Related posts: E-Mental Health Summit in Amsterdam Gel Health, Conference About The Patient Experience in Health Care Mental Health Unit for Personality Disorders Closed in UK ..read more »

Based on two psychiatric assessment procedures, a computer program investigating the presence of a psychotic disorder and a personality questionnaire, Salvador Dali was found to have a personality disorder for DSM Cluster A and B. He was also found to meet the diagnostic criteria for psychotic illnesses. You can't diagnose psychiatric illness without doing a face to face psychiatric examination. Usually personality diagnosis takes even more than one diagnostic interview. Distributing psychiatric diagnoses solely based on "circumstantial evidence", hear say or news stories is obsolete. Nevertheless these authors from `oxford digested a lot of information on which they based the above .....read more »

True or false: “ Pregnant women never commit suicide, they just don’t do it because it’s against human nature” This is what experts declared to a murder trial jury in 1993 after the death of an 38 weeks pregnant woman. Because of this declaration, Eddy Gifoyle, who found his wife hanging in the garage is serving a life sentence for the murder of his pregnant wife. This guest post was written by Veerle Bergink, psychiatrist, besides patient care especially perinatal psychiatry she is also busy on her PhD research project Amazing that this actually happened in the UK, the cradle off perinatal psychiatry... Only .....read more »

The American Journal of Psychiatry has three articles on borderline personality disorder by some of the leading experts. Mostly about the development of the concept which is sumarized by Otto F. Kernberg and Robert Michels as: ...we have made tremendous strides in only a few decades, beginning with a theoretical concept in psychoanalysis that was ridiculed by most other psychiatrists, and progressing to a widely recognized clinical entity; from a pejorative label for disliked patients to a carefully defined diagnostic category; from the subject of almost no systematic study to one of the most intensively researched personality disorders—in terms of diagnosis, .....read more »

Conflict of interest, Dr Shock is one of the editors of this website; psychiatrynet.eu. It started of with a Dutch version of the website: psychiatrienet. Psychiatrynet.eu is an open and free site. It is the property of The Journal of Psychiatry Foundation, an independent organization which generates revenues from subscribers to the journal of the same name. It also receives annual contributions from several Dutch national mental health care facilities, in exchange for which they may place help wanted notices on its website. The principal editors, consultants, and advisers participate on a personal (and voluntary) basis. Every topic describes in its .....read more »

The Soloist, a movie a bout a homeless man with Schizophrenia The Soloist is the true story of Los Angeles journalist, Steve Lopez, who befriends a man named Nathaniel Ayers. Ayers happens to be a homeless Julliard trained musician who has Schizophrenia. It is a most special story about loss, friendship, understanding and redemption. Much stigma surrounds Schizophrenia despite research that shows it holds a neurobiological origin for the disorder. Many still believe that those who have mental illness are unmotivated, lazy or are of weak character - and that their homelessness is by choice, not from circumstance. From .....read more »

This discussion is also going on in the Dutch Psychiatric Association, they mostly follow the APA but will they follow them in this decision? They probably wait for the effect it has on the APA yearly conference. Clinical Psychiatry News The American Psychiatric Association has become one of the first professional societies to take a step away from the appearance of conflict of interest with a decision to repudiate industry-sponsored symposia. The group's board of trustees voted in mid-March to eventually phase out the acceptance of pharmaceutical or medical device industry funding for symposia and meals served at those gatherings during its annual .....read more »

A systematic, easy-to-use tool for physicians when appraising the quality and objectivity of information presented during educational presentations sponsored by the pharmaceutical industry. If you need them for these presentations that is. We have abolished these kind of presentations during residency training but residents also attend symposium with pharma sponsored speakers. So to enhance the instructions for appraisal of these talks the acronym PRESCRIBE was invented as I found in a recent publication in the Canadian Family Physician. PRESCRIBE is an easy-to-remember “checklist” for physicians to use when attending a drug industry–sponsored presentation in order to gauge the degree to which .....read more »

In a recent published research 44,218 and 46,089 baseline users of single typical and atypical drugs, respectively, and 186,600 matched nonusers of antipsychotic drugs were retrospectively compared for the risk of sudden cardiac death. Current users of typical and of atypical antipsychotic drugs had a similar, dose-related increased risk of sudden cardiac death. It was already known that typical antipsychotics increased the risk of sudden cardiac death. This study adds the important knowledge that atypical antipsychotics also carriages that risk increasing with higher dosages. How high is the risk? Current users of typical antipsychotic drugs had an adjusted rate of sudden cardiac .....read more »