Lumateperone (Caplyta) just got FDA approved for bipolar depression. Find out how it compares to other atypical antipsychotics.

Rehan Aziz, MD, explains how to interview older adults and which medications to use and which ones to avoid in this population.

Antihypertensives are among the world’s most widely prescribed drugs, but many of them impact pathways associated with depression. Beta blockers have long been believed to cause depression, but most of these studies were carried out decades ago and their findings have been inconsistent.

Provigil and Nuvigil, the modafinils, may not work for full depressive episodes, but they do something else in bipolar disorder that’s important to patients. This article explores their cognitive effects, as well as their potential to cause addiction and mania.

Andrew Miller, Vice Chair of Psychiatry Research at Emory University, translates two decades research on inflammation and depression into practical terms, including a low-cost biomarker that may guide antidepressant selection.

Quick hints on what you’ll find in this issue.

Dr. Jim Phelps is the author of a textbook on bipolar spectrum disorders, A Spectrum Approach to Mood Disorders: Not Fully Bipolar But Not Unipolar—Practical Management (W. W. Norton & Company) as well as two self-help books on bipolar disorder. He conducted some of the early studies on dark therapy out of his private practice in Oregon, and we caught up with him to learn about this novel treatment for bipolar disorder.

You may have read about the meta-analysis published in Lancet earlier this year on the efficacy evidence for all antidepressants (Cipriani A et al, Lancet 2018;391(10128):1357–1366). It’s a complicated paper, and in this article, we’ll take a closer look at it and give you our take on the bottom line.

Sunshine and other forms of bright light are considered to be helpful for depressed patients. Patients with seasonal affective disorder (SAD) feel better as the days lengthen, and bright light therapy is effective for the depression in patients with and without SAD. However, seasonal studies of suicide have found that the prevalence is highest in the spring, which is counterintuitive if we consider light to be an antidepressant.