Lamotrigine is approved for the prevention of bipolar episodes, but Dr. Aiken explains why it may also treat active bipolar depression. This mood stabilizer is among the most tolerable in its class, and has additional benefits in OCD, borderline personality disorder, and depersonalization disorder.

Loneliness is a readily measurable phenomenon and it predicts worse outcomes in addiction treatment on the individual and population levels. What can we do in the clinic to combat loneliness and promote social cohesion?

Many of us work in settings where we do not speak the language of our patients. The law requires that we have help understanding our patients. This is good sense and good care, but there are multiple pitfalls. This article helps you navigate the necessary of using interpreters.

Physician health programs have boasted high rates of treatment retention and abstinence rates, yet have also been the targets of criticism. Here we review what the practicing clinician can learn from these programs and describe current controversies.

Whether you are referring your patient for a physical or doing an initial one yourself, clinicians should be familiar with the basics of physical examination with a focus on knowing how to look for medical complications of addiction. This article walks you through a basic physical exam and what signs and symptoms to look for in patients with current or past substance use.

There is a high demand for psychiatric care in U.S. correctional facilities. At any given time, about 1% of the adult population is incarcerated, and many of them have a psychiatric disorder of some sort.

While benzodiazepines are effective anti-anxiety workhorses for many patients, most guidelines tell us to avoid prescribing them to substance abusers. The concern is that the benzo high will remind patients of their substances of choice, and that benzo withdrawal symptoms will lead to old substance abuse habits.

Half a century ago, a suicidal young woman named Marsha Linehan spent more than two years in a psychiatric hospital. Locked as tightly in her own personal torment as in her seclusion room, she vowed not only that she would get out, but that she would get well and help...

Marsha Linehan developed DBT to help patients with BPD (Linehan MM, Cognitive Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder. New York, NY: The Guilford Press;1993), and over the past two decades it has received strong empirical support.

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) and bipolar disorder frequently co-occur (numbers range from 8% to 18%), although they are distinct clinical entities (Paris J et al, Compr Psychiatry 2007;48(2):145–154). A proper diagnosis guides the most effective treatment, but you’ve probably faced the difficult challenge of diagnosing these conditions, which share several clinical features.