From the Editor

From the perspective of the treatment team, a rehospitalization is a failure – a patient returning to the system, unwell again. From the perspective of the patient and her or his family, a rehospitalization can be frightening and humiliating.

How best to keep people with bipolar affective disorder out of hospital? In a new JAMA Psychiatry paper, the University of Eastern Finland’s Markku Lähteenvuo and his co-authors attempt to answer this question – not by using a RCT, but instead by tapping Finnish national databases.

For the record, they find one medication works better than the others: lithium.

800px-central_hospital_of_central_finlandFinland’s Central Hospital: adequate architecture but good data

In this Reading, we consider the new paper by Lähteenvuo et al., and also consider their approach.

DG

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