Monthly Archives: November 2015

Anxiety, depression and the workplace

Prins et al had a paper in Sociology of Health and Illness (available here exploring the relationship between what they call `contradictory class location` and mental health – mainly anxiety and depressive disorders. The data for the research was taken from a national survey. Fundamentally, what they show is that, depending on how you measure […]

How support for older people with depression helps

I came across a report on a qualitative study (available here at Medscape) that was embedded in a large quantitative RCT here. The study is particular to the UK style of health care with GPs playing an active role, but I think it lends weight to how collaborative care approaches can help those older adults […]

Suicidal thoughts in depressed children

I came across a paper by Whalen et al (available here,) published this month in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry via a Medscape article on suicidal thoughts in children. The Medscape article title was extremely misleading, presenting the prevalence of suicidal cognitions and behavior among the children studied as a background rate, and not accounting for […]

Light therapy and depression

Light therapy has been around for Seasonal Affective Disorder for some time, but 2 trials involving light therapy caught my eye this week, via Medscape. One small intervention trial by Lam et al, available here, used light therapy compared to fluoxetine for depression and showed that light therapy and combination of light therapy and medication […]

Prevalence of drug use in US

Following up on an earlier post about the prevalence of mental disorder, I just found this which reports that the 12 month prevalence of Alcohol Use Disorders as defined by DSM5 are 14% in US. Again, it is easy to see how New York found such high rates of mental disorders among its inhabitants.

Sense of humor a marker for types of dementia

An interesting paper published online here this month in Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease suggests changes in humor could be a useful marker for certain types of frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimer`s disease. The research group found differences in preference for satirical and absurdist comedy when compared to healthy controls, but preference for slapstick comedy did not […]

The prevalence of mental health problems

A reuters article last week (available here) reported that according to a release from Mayor Bill de Blaiso’s office ahead of his mental-health initiative, one in five adult New Yorkers suffer from depression, substance abuse, suicidal thoughts or other psychological disorders every year. This seems to have caused some surprise in some quarters but the […]

Headspace as online intervention

A client recommended an online intervention to me called Headspace (available here) that they have found useful. I am very enthusiastic about these online cognitive therapy based resources and think they can really complement counseling and psychotherapy. I always recommend such resources to my clients in Tokyo. However, a recent study published in BMJ (available […]

Meditation helps working memory?

There has been a lot of interest in mindfulness-based interventions for psychiatric conditions. What has received rather less coverage is the effects of meditation on working memory. A new study by Quach et al available here suggests mediation may have a significant impact on working memory in adolescents.

Diabetes drug may help depression for those with insulin resistance

A new study published online (here) by Watson et al at Stanford suggests that pioglitazone, a drug used to treat diabetes might be useful in treating patients with both depression and insulin resistance. The medicine did not have an antidepressant effect for those who had depressive disorder but were insulin sensitive, but there was an […]