Treatment of depression in patients with depression or bipolar is often complicated. If medications are prescribed, will they make mood symptoms worse, or have other significant adverse effects? And yet fatigue is common in people with a history of depression (it occurs in up to 10% of the general population and is much more common in women, who have a …
Data Security at Gateway Psychiatric Services
We have been following the stories of data lost or stolen this past year with increasing concern about the safety of the internet. As a result we spent much of the summer hard at work upgrading the level of security at Gateway. This is important work, although not terribly rewarding. Some of these changes – We no longer rely on just user …
RDOCS and DSM 5: Diagnosis and Psychiatry
Tom Insel, the Director of the National Institute for Mental Health, to celebrate the release of DSM5 in May of 2013, famously announced that the manual was already irrelevant to psychiatric research. This quote from Psychology Today captures the moment fairly well. Just two weeks before DSM-5 is due to appear, the National Institute of Mental Health, the world’s largest funding agency …
Low Frequency Magnetic Stimulation is Rapid Antidepressant
There is a lot of interest in an article that just appeared in Biological Psychiatry about a new magnetic stimulation technique that may be associated with rapid antidepressant effects in both unipolar and bipolar depression. Researchers at McLean Hospital were studying Low Frequency Magnetic Stimulation as a way of imaging the brains of bipolar patients and discovered that many of …
New Drug with New Mechanism for Insomnia – Suvorexant
Belsomra (suvorexant) was approved earlier this week by the FDA for use as needed to treat difficulty in falling and staying asleep. The drug blocks receptors for orexin – also known as hypocretin – the master hypothalamic regulator of the sleep-wake cycle. There are, in fact, two forms of orexin, A and B; hence it is a dual orexin …
Depression Costs US 200 Billion Dollars Per Year
A meta-analysis of more than 60 clinical studies covering almost 60,000 adult patients estimates that the total cost in the United States of the treatment of patients with depression is in the range of $188 billion to $200 billion. Roughly a third of all costs ($64 billion) are related to people with treatment-resistant depression, who represent only a fraction of all cases. The article, “A Review of the Clinical, Economic, …