Five of the last six covers of the American Journal of Psychiatry have been chock-full of brains.

Dr. Dougherty, it looks like you've now literally "written the book" on neuroimaging in psychiatry (Essentials of Neuroimaging for Clinical Practice, Dougherty, Rauch, and Rosenbaum, eds., Wash D.C.: APPI, 2004). Congratulations! How did you get interested in this field, originally?

In 1977, Raymond Damadian and a team of graduate students put together the first whole-body MRI scanner, which they dubbed the "Indomitable." Damadian volunteered himself as the first guinea pig.

The very first issue of The Carlat Report (TCR 1:1) featured an article on St. John’s Wort for the treatment of depression. While this may be the most famous of the “natural” antidepressants, we are hearing more and more about others, including those surveyed in this article.

Any of you who choose to do an informal survey of your patients will be surprised how many are taking a non-prescribed sleeping aid. Often this is an antihistamine, but patients are increasingly turning to natural alternatives.

My readers would be in interested in knowing a little bit about your background and how you came to be interested in natural medications for psychiatry.

Dr. Patrick Mullen is a psychiatrist in private practice and a Clinical Instructor at the Department of Psychiatry at University of South Carolina School of Medicine. He recently met a patient who points out some of the potential hazards of natural medications.

Strangely enough, there are only two medications FDA-approved for PTSD--Zoloft (sertraline) and Paxil (paroxetine). This is despite the fact that PTSD is a common problem, with a lifetime prevalence of between 5 and 10%, and can be extremely debilitating.

As you can see from this issue's lead article, SSRIs help alleviate core PTSD symptoms, but hardly roar by the placebo response rate in clinical trials. And anytime the placebo effect is this robust, you can predict that psychotherapy will be very effective. This is certainly true in the world of PTSD.

Let's face it, when our patients are in distress, we use whatever meds we think might be helpful, whether the FDA has given its blessing or not. Not a single one of the nostrums discussed in this article is FDA-approved for PTSD, but they are all commonly used when nothing else works.