Tag: Paris

Reading of the Week: Do Antidepressants Beat Placebo? Does Measurement-based Care Work? Four Papers and Some Thoughts on a Fourth Anniversary

September 27, 2018 /

From the Editor

This month, the Reading of the Week – in its present form – turns four.

Today, the Readings are emailed out from sea to sea to sea. It’s a big evolution from the first Readings, started more than six and a half years ago, with me handing out photocopies of papers on the inpatient ward where I worked.

To celebrate our silk anniversary, I’ve picked four major selections from the past four years. I’ve also included some papers that haven’t been discussed – but should have been.

p9180013Silk: good for a fourth wedding anniversary, but a fourth Reading anniversary?

Enjoy.

DG

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Reading of the Week: Is Psychoanalysis Relevant? Paris vs. Ravitz

June 1, 2017 /

From the Editor

“Today, psychoanalysis has been marginalized and is struggling to survive in a hostile academic and clinical environment. This raises the question as to whether the paradigm is still relevant in psychiatric science and practice.”

This week, we consider the relevance of psychoanalysis.

Drawing from the May issue of The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, we look at two papers.

Freud and analysis: debating his relevance

In a Perspectives piece, Dr. Joel Paris argues that psychoanalysis is part our legacy – but not much more. In an Editorial, Dr. Paula Ravitz responds. She opens by writing: “My concern is that by unnecessarily pitting psychiatry against psychoanalysis, we may throw out the baby with the bathwater.”

It’s a great and important debate.

DG Continue reading

Reading of the Week: What’s New in Psychotherapy – The Cuijpers et al. Paper

September 29, 2016 /

From the Editor

What’s new in psychotherapy?

If there is one area of psychiatry that seems to have been transformed in recent years, it’s psychotherapy. Not surprisingly, then, past Readings have looked at the expanded role of short-term, evidenced-based therapies – in particular, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, or CBT.

Today’s psychotherapy: a long way from Freud

Over the next two weeks, we’ll look in more detail at new developments in psychotherapy.

This week. A major new review of IPT.

Next week. An overview of psychotherapy developments.

This week, we consider a new paper published in The American Journal of Psychiatry on Interpersonal Therapy, or IPT. This paper is clear, lucid, and worth reading.

Is there evidence for IPT? Yes – and more than just for depression.

DG Continue reading

Reading of the Week: ADHD and Overdiagnosis

July 16, 2015 /

Overdiagnosis in psychiatry occurs where patients are identified with a mental disorder when they do not have significant impairment and would not be expected to benefit from treatment. These problems can arise even when diagnostic criteria are met, that is, in the presence of milder symptoms that fall close to, or within, a normal range on a diagnostic spectrum. Overdiagnosis can lead to unnecessary labelling, unneeded tests, unnecessary therapies, and inflated health care costs. In medicine, with the best of intentions, practice has come to favour more tests and more treatments, all of which tend to drive overdiagnosis. This problem may be worsened by a prevailing cultural ethos that more is better.

Outside of psychiatry, there are clear examples of overdiagnosis. For example, screening programs designed to detect early stages of certain cancers appear to increase incidence estimates, but may have no discernable effect on mortality…

Psychiatry has followed this trend. It has been estimated that at least 40% to 50% of the population will meet criteria for at least 1 psychiatric diagnosis during their lifetime. The current system of nosology in psychiatry, based on phenomenology, that is, subjective reports and clinical observations, encourages overdiagnosis. The presence or absence of mental disorders is not defined by biomarkers, allowing diagnostic constructs to describe broad spectra that cross over into normality.

So begins a short, sharp article on overdiagnosis in psychiatry that has just been published. The authors raise significant issues about psychiatry in general and adult ADHD in particular – they argue that the DSM diagnosis is flawed and impractical; they take aim at patients (yes, patients); they then turn their sites on researchers and industry.

The comments of sensational journalists? The skewed opinion of Scientologists on a blog? Actually, the Reading comes from the pages of The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry and, for the record, the paper’s first author is one of the most prominent psychiatrists in the country; Dr. Joel Paris is the past chair of McGill’s Department of Psychiatry and the author of more than a dozen books.

This week’s Reading: “Is Adult Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Being Overdiagnosed?” by Paris et al.

Here’s the link:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26175391

The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry has always been worth reading, but its new editor, Dr. Scott Patten, has taken this journal to the next level. And, in my opinion, this “perspective” paper is a must-read – one of the most important papers written this year. Continue reading