Tag:

Treatment

Ketamine Infusions Show Some Small, Limited Value in Open-Label Study

by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. 11/24/2024

The sad state of affairs for treatment-resistant depression is that even if your treatment fails in 70 percent of the subjects you try it on, folks will still hail it as a success.

So it goes with a small study of 28 patients in the UK who had severe clinical depression that didn’t respond to any previous treatments. Only 8 of them responded to ketamine infusions. Of those 8, only 4 actually remitted — meaning they had no depression at the end of the study.

Those are not great statistics for any treatment to hail as a success. Why the disconnect?

11/24/2024 1 comment

$30M Trumps $15M Any Day: Why Private Industry is Putting the Federal Government to Shame

by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. 11/17/2024

By John M. Grohol, Psy.D.

Back in mid-February, Rep. Ron Barber (D-Ariz.) trumped the addition of $15 million for mental health first aid training that was passed in a $1.1 trillion spending bill. Sadly, Barber also connected the funding to helping stop future instances of mass shootings — a connection that simply has no basis in reality. But hey, at least he’s doing something.

This past week, the CEO of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, announced $30 million to help research into brain trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He also promised last year to hire at least 10,000 veterans and military spouses over the next five years.

Which do you think is doing more to help mental health? Government or private citizens & industry?

11/17/2024 0 comment

Latuda: A New Treatment Option for Bipolar Depression

by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. 10/15/2024

By John M. Grohol, Psy.D.

The depressive episodes that accompany bipolar disorder have often perplexed both people who have bipolar disorder and the professionals who want to help treat them. People with ordinary clinical depression — at one time called unipolar depression — often have a few treatment options to choose from, usually starting with psychotherapy or antidepressants.

But using antidepressants in the treatment of depression of someone who has bipolar disorder can have unexpected — and unwanted — effects. Studies of antidepressant use in bipolar disorder have been decidedly mixed.

So it’s always welcome news when a new medication — or a new use for an existing medication — has been approved. Such is the case with Latuda (lurasidone).

10/15/2024 113 comments

Can a Single Study Have Such Influence Over ADHD Treatment?

by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. 10/4/2024

By John M. Grohol, Psy.D.

magnifying glass research bigst Imagine that in a world where thousands of new studies are published every year, and hundreds of studies are conducted on any one condition, that one gleaming, gold-standard study has the ability to completely determine the course of treatment for one condition. For decades.

If you find that hypothetical situation difficult to swallow, you’re not alone. Experts and specialists of a condition such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) rarely rely on a single study’s results to help guide their treatment decisions. And even when they do, it’s nearly always done within the context of a specific patient’s individualized needs.

So can a single study have such influence over the choice of treatments in ADHD? Let’s find out.

10/4/2024 3 comments

Veterans Day 2013: Honoring Our Vets with Better Access to Mental Health Care

by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. 9/16/2024

By John M. Grohol, Psy.D.

This Veterans Day, we honor the sacrifices made by our veterans, fighting for freedom and liberty not only for Americans, but for people everywhere.

It’s not just the veterans themselves who face mental health issues — such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or crippling anxiety — but their families too. Families who have to cope not only with the great distances and not knowing if their soldier-husband or soldier-wife will ever return, but also with the possibly of having that person return broken. Lost. Something less-than.

And while the Veterans Administration has made great strides in providing better care for veterans in the past few years, it still has a long ways to go.

9/16/2024 0 comment

Why Doctors Oversell Benefits, Undersell Risks and Side Effects

by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. 9/16/2023

By John M. Grohol, Psy.D.

Why Doctors Oversell Benefits, Undersell Risks and Side Effects Virtually across the board of medicine and psychiatry, doctors will constantly and consistently oversell the benefits of a given treatment, and undersell the risks and side effects of it. This may not be as surprising when you look at some of the key factors into how medical and psychiatric treatment is learned and then conducted on patients.

Why do doctors often oversell the benefits of a given treatment, and minimize the risks and side effects of it?

1. Treatment is rarely experienced first-hand.

While you don’t need to undergo surgery to understand the benefits of surgery or how to do surgery, you will surely have a great appreciation to the patient’s perspective if every surgeon was required to get an appendectomy before being allowed to practice. Surgeons know, in most cases only hypothetically, what it is like to go under the scalpel. I wonder how much differently a surgeon might practice if that were no longer the case.

In the same vein, I wonder how many psychiatrists would continue to prescribe atypical antipsychotics or electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) if they themselves tried it a few times. That’s because we treat fixing human problems the same way we treat fixing a car or dish disposal — it’s just plumbing and organic connections.

9/16/2023 18 comments