Alison Heru, MD, gives the following additional advice for conducting effective family meetings.

If you want to comprehensively understand your patients and modify variables that might impact treatment and outcome, it’s important to understand families. There has been a lot of research showing that the family environment can have a significant influence on the course of an illness, either in a protective or risk-inducing way.

Treatment-resistant depression (TRD) is typically defined as a major depression that fails to remit after at least 2 trials of 2 different classes of antidepressants. Other than electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), there remain few evidence-based biological treatment options for TRD.

The mainstay of current treatment for panic disorder involves SSRIs and psychotherapy, specifically either cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) or exposure with response prevention (ERP) therapy. Several studies have evaluated whether adding DCS to ERP therapy might enhance the effectiveness of the therapy, but there have been mixed results.

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After reading these articles, you should be able to…

When I was training in the 1990s, diagnosing bipolar disorder seemed straightforward. These patients often came to our attention because of a flagrant manic episode. You may still remember the first time you treated a manic patient—I certainly do.

Dr. Aiken discusses the history of bipolar disorder and goes through some key tips on diagnosing bipolar disorder, including the bipolarity index and specific questions to ask patients to help narrow down the diagnosis.

Since estrogen can affect neurotransmitter functioning, there has been some interest in using estrogen modulators to treat psychiatric conditions, including schizophrenia. Raloxifene is a selective estrogen receptor modulator (SERM) with some preliminary evidence for effectiveness in women with schizophrenia.