From the Editor

He survived a terrible car accident and recalls his worst memory: being pinned for hours in his Honda as rescuers attempted to free him, eventually with the Jaws of Life. The mental recovery proved more complicated than the physical one, with flashbacks and nightmares and the resulting substance misuse. He tried different therapies, but would he have benefitted from alternative treatments?

Dr. Michael Hollifield (of George Washington University) and his co-authors look at acupuncture for PTSD in a new JAMA Psychiatry study. They did an impressive randomized clinical trial involving 93 combat veterans with PTSD who received either verum or sham acupuncture. “[V]erum acupuncture had a large pretreatment to posttreatment effect and was statistically superior to sham needling for reducing PTSD symptoms and enhancing fear extinction.” We consider the paper and its clinical implications.

Across North America, there are more people than ever before who are chronically homeless. Who are they? What psychiatric problems do they have? How can we help them? In the second selection, Dr. Vicky Stergiopoulos (of the University of Toronto) considers those who are chronically homeless in a podcast interview for Quick Takes. “The problem is visible. It’s in our streetcars and buses, our subways, our streets, and it’s hard to ignore.”

And in the third selection, Dr. Suzanne Koven (of Harvard University) writes about mentorship in The New England Journal of Medicine. She discusses how a mentor’s advice transformed her career and then considers what makes for good mentorship. “A mentor is someone who has more imagination about you than you have about yourself.”

DG

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