After reading these articles, you should be able to…

Health care reform is back on the national agenda with a vengeance. Obama made this a central part of his campaign platform and recently met with various insurance and medical groups to begin the lobbying and persuasion process. Why does the Obama administration appear to have high hopes for another attempt at universal health care? And what might such a system mean for psychiatrists?

Psychiatric treatment has been discriminated against by insurance companies for years. The recent passage of historic parity legislation may change this. Can you bring us up to speed on the history of this difficult relationship between insurance companies and psychiatrists?

Dr. Nissen, you have been at the forefront of those who believe that the FDA is not doing a good enough job of warning the public about adverse effects of drugs. What is the problem?

A recent meta-analysis examined all blinded clinical trials that directly compared second-generation antipsychotics, including 76 trials with 13,558 participants.

A recent study investigated the relationship between the use of SSRIs prior to or during pregnancy and the development of gestational hypertension and preeclampsia.

Researchers (not paid by the drug company) examined data from GlaxoSmithKline’s database of clinical trials for lamotrigine (Lamictal) as a treatment for bipolar depression.

After reading these articles, you should be able to…

You may have noticed a recent torrent of FDA approvals and clinical trials for atypical antipsychotics in every disorder under the sun–except psychosis. Is this simply an effort by the sponsoring companies to get us to prescribe more antipsychotics? Or are these drugs truly effective for non-psychotic disorders? What’s the quality of the evidence?

Over the past several years, the use of antipsychotics has expanded dramatically. Aside from the traditional indication, schizophrenia, various members of this class have received FDA approval for bipolar mania, bipolar depression, major depression, and autism, and increasingly they are used off-label for anxiety, insomnia, and agitation.