It’s our tradition that we begin the New Year by reviewing the best of the past year; so, this week, we look back at 2022.
But a bit of a break from tradition: this year, we haven’t organized the papers by different categories, instead choosing eight great papers. Some have been published in big journals; others, not so big. They cover a variety of topics, from prevention to cutting-edge treatments. The one common thread: all are clinically relevant. And, yes, there is a Person of the Year. Spoiler alert: he had a big career and likes to mention Groucho Marx.
An observation about this past year: the quality of scholarship was very high. We’ve picked good papers – but could have picked scores of others. It’s a comment we’ve made in past years, and a good reason for optimism as our field grows more sophisticated and relevant.
What’s the best medication for bipolar disorder? Today, we have a variety of options from the old (lithium) to the new (modern antipsychotics). But what to prescribe?
In the first selection from The British Journal of Psychiatry, Cecilie Fitzgerald (of the Danish Research Institute for Suicide Prevention) and her co-authors try to answer these questions with a cohort study including those diagnosed with bipolar and living in Denmark between 1995 and 2016. They employ two types of analyses and focus on suicide, self-harm, and psychiatric hospital admissions. They conclude: “Although confounding by indication cannot be excluded, lithium seems to have better outcomes in the treatment of bipolar disorder than other mood stabilisers.” We consider the paper and its implications.
Lithium: not just for Teslas?
In the second selection, Stef Kouvaras (of the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust) and her co-authors consider a single-session psychotherapy intervention for an inpatient unit. In this recently published brief report for Psychiatric Services, they do a feasibility and acceptability study of positive psychotherapy. “The findings of this study indicate that positive psychotherapy is feasible and acceptable on acute psychiatric wards and that service users with severe and complex mental health conditions find the intervention helpful.”
In the final selection, executive coach Brad Stulberg writes about his experiences with OCD for The New York Times. He notes that his diagnosis helped him find care – but he worries about labels. “The stigma around mental illness has certainly not disappeared. But increasingly, mental health diagnoses are being embraced as identity statements.”
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