Tag: Stone

Reading of the Week: Cannabis & Driving – a New RCT; Also, Prolonged Grief Disorder (JAMA Psych) and the Life and Legacy of Alan A. Stone (NYT)

From the Editor

It’s legal. It’s readily available. What are the implications for road safety?

Cannabis is the focus of more and more research. Little, though, has been studied for its effects on driving. In the first selection, Thomas D. Marcotte (of the University of California San Diego) and his co-authors consider cannabis and driving performance. In a new paper for JAMA Psychiatry, they report on an RCT: “In a placebo-controlled parallel study of regular cannabis users smoking cannabis with different THC content ad libitum, there was statistically significant worsening on driving simulator performance in the THC group compared with the placebo group.” We consider the paper and its clinical implications.

Next month, the American Psychiatric Association releases DSM-5-TR, the first major update to the DSM series in nine years. Though the diagnostic criteria of several disorders have been revised, there is only one new disorder: prolonged grief disorder. In the second selection, Holly G. Prigerson (of Cornell University) and her co-authors write about it for JAMA Psychiatry. “PGD is a serious mental disorder that puts the patient at risk for intense distress, poor physical health, shortened life expectancy, and suicide.”

Finally, in the third selection, we consider the life and legacy of Dr. Alan A. Stone, a psychiatrist who passed at the age of 92. In his obituary for The New York Times, reporter Clay Risen describes his incredible career – as a psychoanalyst, a Harvard professor (in both the faculties of law and medicine), and a former president of the American Psychiatric Association who championed dropping homosexuality as a psychiatric disorder.

DG

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Reading of the Week: On Spade, Suicide, and the New CDC Report

From the Editor

“I didn’t know Kate Spade, who hanged herself with a red scarf in her bedroom on Tuesday at the age of 55, other than through the prism of her insistently cheerful and whimsical accessories. But everything about Ms. Spade and her designs suggested a sunny temperament, from her candy-colored aesthetic to the perky image she projected. We have a hard time squaring a seemingly successful woman — one with a highflying career, a family and heaps of money — with a despondency so insinuating that it led her to end it all. All this helps explain why Fern Mallis, the former director of the Council of Fashion Designers of America and a friend of Ms. Spade’s, called her death ‘so out of character.’ In fact, it turned out that the bubbly girl from Kansas City ‘suffered from depression and anxiety for many years,’ as her husband, Andy, said.”

So writes novelist Daphne Merkin The New York Times. In the essay, Merkin writes about her depression and her own suicidal thoughts.

Kate Spade. Then Anthony Bourdain.

It’s been a remarkable few days.

bourdain-obama-429e2fd0-b412-4a22-804a-acb7a25d8d43Anthony Bourdain with President Barack Obama

In this Reading, we look at the new CDC report on suicide in the United States. Suicide rates south of the 49thparallel have risen nearly 30% since 1999. We consider the paper and its implications.

DG

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