Monthly Archives: December 2015

Open over New Year!

Tokyo Mental Health is open for clients over the New Year week end. if you would like a consultation for counseling and psychotherapy, please contact us on [email protected] Happy New Year!

Collaboration with American Clinic Tokyo

I am pleased to announce that Tokyo Mental Health is now collaborating with American Clinic Tokyo to offer counseling and psychotherapy to the foreign community and bilingual Japanese people in Tokyo and the surrounding area. If you wish to see a UK-licensed psychiatrist for counseling or psychotherapy in Tokyo, please contact either Tokyo Mental Health […]

Depression and Inflammation

A new and interesting study by Prossin et al throws some light on the role between depression, inflammatory processes in the body and other diseases such as cardiovascular disease.

Treatment and Morality in Schizophrenia

Interesting study by Tilhonen et al published online and available here on the associations between long term medication use and mortality risk in patients with schizophrenia. It is possible that the results were due to confounding. I look forward to further publications on this topic.

Meds for Bipolar Depression

The CEQUEL study just published by Geddes et al from Oxford is a significant contribution to our understanding of how to best treat patients with bipolar depression.

Gender Identity

Interesting article on Medscape (here) this week that highlights changing attitudes to the medical treatment of people with gender identity dysphoria. The trend seems to be towards an increasingly biological view of the issue. Certainly some of the very positive reported outcomes for such patients are encouraging. The Royal College of Psychiatrists in UK has […]

Drugs without the hot air

I would recommend the book `Drugs without the Hot Air` by David Nutt, Professor of Psychiatry who is now at Imperial College London in UK. It is a recent book, written for the lay reader, which explains the effects, both beneficial and harmful, of recreational drugs. It covers nicotine in cigarettes and has a good chapter on […]

Pregnancy and depression

The debate on antidepressants in pregnancy continues with an article published in JAMA Pediatrics (available here) by Boukhris this week that concludes: Use of antidepressants, specifically selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, during the second and/or third trimester increases the risk of ASD in children, even after considering maternal depression. Further research is needed to specifically assess […]

What traditional societies can teach us about raising children

Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs and Steel, has a very interesting new book that devotes a chapter to examining how children are raised in traditional communities. The book is called ‘The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies‘ and makes fascinating reading.

Guidance on management of Alcohol misuse disorders

<p>Reviewing guidance on alcohol misuse disorders, I see that UK National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) has 3 documents on this topic. All are worth reading. One focuses on alcohol-related disorders, one on harmful use and dependence itself, and one on public health approaches including screening. The most striking point is how common alcohol harmful […]