Do antidepressants cause bipolar II patients to switch from depression to hypomania? It’s a controversial question, and you’ll find academic psychiatrists who will argue passionately that antidepressants are either safe or dangerous in these patients. The latest study appears to endorse the “safe” camp.

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The latest official statement on psychotherapies from the American Psychological Association more or less states that all techniques are equally effective, and it’s likely that the skills of individual therapists are as important as the specific technique they choose. This is all well and good, but meanwhile, in the real world, we need to make decisions about how to treat specific patients. If we wait for the definitive answers from research, we will be waiting for a very long time. This article details certain well-known techniques drawn from the broad umbrella of cognitive behavior therapy.

Insomnia is so ubiquitous and misunderstood with respect to its health consequences and “treatability.” At the core of this is the widespread misconception that insomnia is primarily a symptom of other things. Insomnia is also identified in DSM-5 as an independent disorder (780.52) which, when occurring with other DSM-5 disorders, is considered a comorbid disorder rather than a symptom.

Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are considered the first-line treatment for depression; however, our confidence in their safety took a hit when the FDA issued a warning in 2011 about doses of citalopram above 40 mg causing QTc prolongation.

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After reading these articles, you should be able to…

Given how many essentially equivalent medications we have to choose from, how great would it be to have a test that tells us which drug to prescribe for which patient? Everybody wants personalized medicine, and in some other specialties, such as oncology, this is becoming a standard part of treatment. In this article, we’ll review some of the basics of pharmacogenetic testing and examine in more detail the commercial genetic tests that are currently available.

The basic goal of this kind of research is to try to find an association between a genetic variant and the clinical response to a particular medication. Given that there are dozens of medications to choose from for any given disorder, it would be very helpful if we could do a genetic test that would tell us which drug is the best for a particular patient.