Category: antidepressant

  • Switching Psych Meds Often Doesn’t Help

    A recently published meta-analysis of over 3000 studies suggested that switching antidepressants after the first drug doesn’t produce the desired results is not better than staying the course and/or exploring options other than trying a different drug.  This is a very interesting finding as most prescribing clinicians tend to give one antidepressant a “trial” of…

  • Prevalence of Psychiatric Medication Use

    A recent research letter, published by JAMA, reported that one out of six American adults take at least one psychiatric medication.  As a clinical psychologist I understand the benefits of non-medical treatments for psychiatric illness, but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate appropriate use of psychiatric meds.  In fact, I refer a significant number of…

  • Is Psychotherapy Better Than Medication?

    The American College of Physicians has released a new clinical guideline on the treatment of depression in the Annals of Internal Medicine.  They suggested that psychotherapy is as effective for treating depression as antidepressants, and “given its relative lack of potential harms, should be strongly considered as the first-line treatment.” This is consistent with the…

  • Primary Care Providers to Screen all Patients for Depression

    The US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) now officially recommends that primary care health clinicians screen all of their patients for depression. Though this is wonderful, this is very, very long overdue. The costs associated with depression and other mental health screen are insignificant relative to the potential gains of “catching” otherwise unrecognized suffering patients.…

  • Can Talk Therapy Change Your Brain?

    I teach a great professional development and clinical consultation class at Loyola University Maryland.  Yesterday morning my doctoral students and I had a great discussion about what makes psychotherapy work (among some other very stimulating discussions).  This morning I received an email with a link to an article entitled, Revival of psychotherapy? How “talk” therapy…

  • Therapy, Medication or Both (or Neither)?

    I stumbled upon this brief piece in the Huffington Post about when patients should consider doing psychotherapy, trying medication, doing both at the same time or not doing anything at all.  I liked this article because it was short and to the point while giving some nice examples behind the answer to the question: “it…

  • Psychotherapy Helps Prevent Suicide

    An article was recently published in The Lancet Psychiatry and nicely summarized in Forbes describing the benefits of even short-term psychotherapy on repeated suicide attempts and suicide related deaths.  Not surprisingly, the data suggest that talk therapy serves to significantly reduce the frequency of suicide following a previous suicide attempt.  The Forbes article also very…

  • Should you really be scared of antidepressants?

    For the past decade some of the “newer” antidepressants have had “black box warnings” that caution about a risk of suicidal thoughts and behaviors in young adults and kids.  Though there has been controversy about this, the benefits and risks of these easily misinterpreted warnings is finally being looked at a bit more closely again…

  • Blood test for Depression?

    A couple months ago there were a few articles that ran about developing a blood test for Major Depressive Disorder ( see: The Chicago Tribune, CBS News, TIME, Medscape, Huffington Post, Newsweek, New York Magazine and HealthDay).  This sounds great: it could revolutionize the diagnostic process making more precise distinctions between Depression and other disorders,…

  • Need an antidepressant? Try exercise!

    Research has shown that when depressed people exercise 3-5 times per day for 45-60 minutes per session and achieve a heart rate of 50-85% of their max heart rate, the exercise is as effective, if not more effective, than medication. The Atlantic published a nice summary of the research and relevant literature.