When HIPAA first came out, the big concern was that it would limit the release of psychiatric information and would place barriers to being able to talk to other members of a patient’s treatment team. But it turns out that HIPAA actually had the opposite effect in many ways.

We generally think of major depression as a single disorder with various possible symptoms. The only specific profile that we sometimes look for is atypical depression, encompassing reverse neurovegetative symptoms and reactivity of mood.

Because standard antipsychotics don’t do much for the negative symptoms of schizophrenia (such as affective flattening and paucity of speech), there has been a fair amount of interest in the so-called “hypoglutaminergic hypothesis” of schizophrenia.

In case you haven’t heard, Walmart has started offering certain generic prescription drugs at $4 per month supply.

Medications only work modestly for the treatment of alcohol dependence. In TCPR’s last issue on substance abuse (June 2006) we reviewed the evidence on disulfiram (Antabuse), naltrexone, and acamprosate, and concluded that naltrexone works modestly, acamprosate works less well, and Antabuse has little high quality data but probably works modestly for highly motivated patients.

Tatiana Tarasoff was a student at the University of California at Berkely in the late 1960s, and she met Prosenjit Poddar, a graduate student from India, at a folk dancing class.

After reading these articles, you should be able to…

While few psychiatrists specialize in eating disorders, most of us see patients with anorexia or bulimia from time to time. It’s hard to keep up on the latest literature when we see such patients rarely. As you’ll read in this article, eating disorders are still among the most challenging treatment issues in psychiatry.

Dr. Bulik, I first learned about your work when I reviewed your book, Runaway Eating, which I rated as the best book for patients on eating disorders. I know that one of the reasons that you gave the book that title is that many patients don’t quite fit the conventional diagnostic categories of anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa.

Recall that in October of 2003, the FDA issued a public health advisory about the possibility that antidepressants cause suicidal ideation in children and adolescents.