Do you know what other medications your depressed patients are taking? You should. If they’re taking non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), they may be less likely to respond to SSRIs.

It seems that not a week goes by without another research paper drawing attention to the interface between immunology and psychiatry, or about biomarkers to predict response to psychotropic medications. A recent report from researchers at Emory University weighs in on both of these issues.

A heated debate over how well psychiatric medications actually work has led some authorities in our field to suggest that psychiatry is currently experiencing a “crisis of confidence.”

In 2011 in the pages of TCPR, we asked, “What’s new in antidepressant treatment?” The answer was “not much” (TCPR, April 2011). In 2012, unfortunately, the answer isn’t very different.

Psychiatrists have long wondered whether someday we might have an objective way to diagnose depression, in much the same way an internist orders a blood test or X-ray. A recent article suggests that just such a test might be on the horizon. Is it the real deal?

It has been over a year now since the approval of vilazodone (Viibryd). As you may recall from our review of the drug in TCPR April 2011, vilazodone is an SSRI with partial agonism at the 5HT1A receptor.

In the US, 60% of children report exposure to violence, abuse or other trauma in the past year. Traumatized children like Karina can present to treatment with a range of symptoms, including anxiety, irritability, disruptive behaviors, mood dysregulation, and developmental regression.

Insomnia is one of the most common comorbidities you’ll see in your depressed and anxious patients. But it is often misunderstood. While the common view is that insomnia is caused by a primary psychiatric or medical condition, it is more accurate to simply say that patients have insomnia and depression at the same time. Insomnia is almost never an isolated problem.

This handy table lists the medications most often used to treat insomnia.

The editors at TCPR, as well as many of you, received a notice issued by the FDA on August 24, 2011 warning us that citalopram (Celexa) at doses higher than 40 mg may cause dangerous prolongation of the QT interval, which can increase the risk of cardiac arrhythmias (including the potentially fatal torsade de pointes).