Month: November 2016

Reading of the Week: The NEJM on “Our Struggle to Care for People with Serious Mental Illness”

From the Editor

What can we do for those with severe mental illness?

Homelessness: can we do better?

This week, we look at a series of excellent essays that have run on mental illness in The New England Journal of Medicine. They are well written and insightful. We particularly focus on the first of the three essays, which considers treatment and rights.

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Reading of the Week: The New CANMAT Guidelines for Depression

From the Editor

What’s new in depression treatment?

The new guidelines

This week, we look at the new CANMAT guidelines. Published in September in The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, the papers – six in all – speak to the latest in depression management.

What should you think about the new antidepressants? What alternatives are there to CBT? What to do when everything else fails? Spoiler alert: this week’s Reading answers all these questions and more.

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Reading of the Week: The Placebo Effect and Antidepressants

From the Editor

Is the placebo effect getting stronger with time?

image001Placebo pills – greater importance?

Since the first writings of English physician John Haygarth at the turn of the 19th century, the placebo effect is something well documented and well discussed – but not well understood. How can people respond to sugar pills and the like?

Even more oddly, the placebo effect seems to be changing with time, at least in terms of antidepressant medications. In a classic paper published about a decade and a half ago, Walsh et al. found that the placebo effect was getting more pronounced over the years. Dr. Timothy Walsh joked in a Washington Post interview that “[t]hey’re making placebos better and better.” Besides being an interesting finding, there are larger issues – start with the implications to drug development. After all, if the placebo effect is rising, it becomes more challenging to develop a drug that bests it.

Have things changed since the publication of the Walsh et al. paper?

In this week’s Reading, we consider the new Furukawa et al. paper. This study, which reviewed 250 plus randomized controlled trials that involved more than 26,000 patients and included unpublished data, found that the placebo effect isn’t increasing. Also in the Reading: an editorial commenting on the Furukawa et al. paper.

Please note – there will be no Reading next week.

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