What goes on inside a residential rehab program? Inquiring minds would love to know, especially those of us who are treating addicts and counseling concerned family members. Rehab has traditionally been a kind of black box, an opaque entity where addicts enter, and 30 days later exit with an epiphany and a lifelong commitment to sobriety. Until they relapse and go back to another rehab, that is.

How should we talk about marijuana with our patients? Psychiatrists are often called upon to describe the adverse effects of smoking marijuana and asked about legitimate medical benefits. Here's an overview of ways to answer those questions.

There is a wide array of treatment options for patients with various levels of addiction issues, but of those rehab is one of the most well-known. Dr. Willenbring makes the argument that inpatient rehab is not an effective method to combat addiction.

An intervention has become the starting place for an addict's journey to rehab. We all have a notion of family and friends gathering around a patient and sharing their feelinings. Mr. Gallant is a professional interventionist, who has planned and executed interventions for 28 years. This interview shares his expertise in the area and provides his sense of how interventions fit into the addiction treatment process.

You may or may not consider smoking cessation to be part of your job description. But tobacco use disorder is a psychiatric syndrome, per DSM-5.

Dr. Eissenberg discusses e-cigarettes, including an overview of the product, ways they are used and misused, and how they fit into the landscape of smoking cessation methods.

Quitting smoking requires a lot of motivation—something our patients don’t always have. Since money is a great motivator, various programs that pay patients to quit have been tried over the years. But how well does this technique work?

Choosing the “right” treatment for a given patient involves a large number of factors, including personal preference—both the clinician’s and the patient’s. Is there a better way?

Get advice on how to evaluate the methodology of biomarker studies in an interview with James Coyne, PhD, clinical health psychologist, professor emeritus of in the psychiatry with University of Pennsylvania and professor of health psychology, University of Groningen, the Netherlands.

Chances are good that we under-medicate alcoholics. According to one estimate, only 10% of alcoholics receive medications as part of their treatment (Jonas DE et al, JAMA 2014;311(18):1889–1900). That’s too bad, because these medications work. In this article, we focus strictly on medications that appear to be effective, both those approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and those that are commonly used off-label.