In our last post, Medical Comorbidity in Bipolar Disorder: Just the (Unpleasant) Facts), a guest post on Madam Bipolar, an innovative site dedicated solely to issues surrounding the illness, we addressed the upsettingly high correlation between bipolar disorder (BD) and physical… Continue Reading
“Popularity is the easiest thing in the world to gain and it is the hardest thing to hold.” That’s what Will Rogers famously thought–but he had obviously never met Xanax. Sometimes looking at the trajectories of various medications for mental… Continue Reading
Late spring and summer, as time frees children from airless school-rooms, and pale white arms peek out from under the season’s first short-sleeved shirts, has historically caused problems for people with bipolar disorder. For well over a century researchers and… Continue Reading
It has been ‘known’ in the way that you know things deep down, when you don’t really consciously want to know them, that seriously mentally ill people, on average, die younger than those without mental illness. But it was an ugly shock… Continue Reading
Let’s do some role-playing.You’re a psychiatrist, attending a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association (APA). So far so good? Alright. Well, you’ve also attended the 2009 and 2010 APA meetings, and, being interested in psychopharmacology (aka drugs), you’ve attended the… Continue Reading
I’d venture to say that no one wants to win a depression contest. Anyone would be happy to concede defeat in a competition between who has the greatest number of major depressive episodes (MDEs), and how severe they are. The loser… Continue Reading
“New York’s Riker’s Island, Chicago’s Cook County Jail and the Los Angeles County Jail are the largest mental health institutions in the nation. . . 15 percent of the inmates of those three jails are mentally ill, making penal institutions… Continue Reading
With the roll-out of Clozaril, in 1989, with its promise to treat recalcitrant schizophrenics, the era of the second-generation, or ‘atypical,’ antipsychotics, was born. And there is much the atypicals offer over the first-generation antipsychotics, including freedom from fear from the… Continue Reading
Paediatric bipolar disorder is notoriously controversial with the epicentre of the debate being whether the condition can be diagnosed in pre-pubertal children at all ~ Ghaemi & Martin Do you remember I wrote a while back that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual… Continue Reading
Americans are used to being the butt of jokes for Europeans. They mock our weight, our tendency to be mono-lingual, our lack of awareness of international affairs, our swiftness to call a lawyer to sue. “Let them laugh,” we think.… Continue Reading
The pieces on pediatric bipolar will be written by my daughter, Rhona, a science writer who has played a seminal role in the blog since its birth. (That’s lucky for me, as, frankly, I still don’t know what that “html” tab does.)… Continue Reading
This may be shameful to admit, but I trust you’ll forgive me. As far as I could remember when I first came across it in my research on this topic, my familiarity with chromium came from Billy Joel’s “Allentown.” Remember?… Continue Reading
