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Substance use disorders are relatively common in primary care settings. Can busy physicians accurately detect them with just one question?

Depression is a known risk factor for cardiovascular disease (CVD), but, surprisingly, it’s not known whether effectively treating depression can reduce the risk of a future cardiovascular event in depressed patients without preexisting CVD.

Psychiatric disorders account for billions of dollars of costs related to absenteeism, reduced productivity, and treatment each year. Most research in this area has focused on standard DSM diagnoses, but it may be more informative to look instead at psychiatric symptoms, such as insomnia and emotional distress, and their effect on the workplace.

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Many people claim that meditation helps them reduce stress, anxiety, or depression, but little quality evidence exists to support those anecdotes. Add to that the difficulty in designing a controlled trial of meditation—eg, how can people be blinded to their treatment group?—and it’s hard to know how to counsel patients on the effectiveness of this strategy.

Schizophrenia, a condition that is thought to affect 1% of the world’s population, remains one of the most challenging psychiatric disorders to treat.

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