Month: January 2017

Reading of the Week: Physician, Heal Thyself? The Gold et al. Study on Docs and Disclosure (and Mental Illness)

January 26, 2017 /

From the Editor

If you had depression, would you tell people?

This week’s Reading is a paper from General Hospital Psychiatry that considers just this question. In it, the authors surveyed American female physicians, asking about mental disorders and why they would or wouldn’t choose to get help – and to tell people.

Would you share your mental health history?

This paper is paired with an essay written by Dr. Nathaniel P. Morris, a Stanford resident of psychiatry, who mulls mental illness and disclosure – and has a big disclosure of his own.

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Reading of the Week: Drugs, Drugs, Drugs – Vermont Tries To Break The Addiction Cycle, and Minister Philpott Weighs In On Opioids

January 19, 2017 /

From the Editor

“I don’t think that we can sit back and be complacent for one moment,” said Toronto Mayor John Tory in a media interview in which he called for an ‘all hands on deck’ approach to dealing with opioids.

It’s a comment on our times when the mayor of Canada’s largest city is focused on the use (and abuse) of opioids. And so are others – opioid addiction has sparked conversations across North America, from big city Canada to rural America. In 2014, Peter Shumlin, governor of the second smallest state in the U.S., devoted his annual address to the opioid problem striking “every corner” of Vermont.

Vermont: hills, lakes, opioids

How we deal with opioids is complicated, touching on everything from drug regulation to clinician education. But the legal response is particularly interesting – the intersection of the law, addiction, and public policy. And so, in this Reading, we look at the Green Mountain State. In a Wall Street Journal essay, reporters Jennifer Levitz and Scott Calvert discuss Vermont’s experimentation with mandatory treatment for minor drug-related crimes – and the struggles of a young user.

We also consider federal Minister of Health Jane Philpott’s recent essay on the opioid issue, which ran in The Globe and Mail last week. She calls on us to address the roots of the issue – which “are tangled and deep.”

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Reading of the Week: Can We Predict Relapse in Depression? The Judd et al. Paper from The American Journal of Psychiatry

January 12, 2017 /

From the Editor

Is he going to get sick again?

It’s a question that we often ask when a patient overcomes depression and happily leaves our office. For many patients, depression is a chronic illness – and so, remission is followed by relapse. Is it possible to predict patients with depression who are in remission but at risk of relapse?

Can we predict a future relapse – or is this an exercise in fortune-telling?

This week’s Reading is a paper from The American Journal of Psychiatry. Drawing on a long-term study, they look at the pattern of acute illness, remission, and relapse. Using statistical analyses, the authors seek to find a way of predicting relapse.

Spoiler alert: they do.

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