Every so often the stars align themselves in such a way that you will be referred an "easy" adolescent. This is a teenager who looks and dresses like you, who is seeking help on his or her own urging, who describes depressive or anxiety symptoms articulately, and who responds well to standard treatment.

John Watson (1878-1958) was one of the more colorful figures in the history of American psychology. The poor son of violent, drinking man in South Carolina, Watson managed to gain admission to a local college, and then studied psychology at University of Chicago.

If you were in TCR's editorial offices, surrounded by boxes of articles about acetylcholinesterase inhibitors (AChEI’s), you would quickly develop a sinking sensation. Not because the articles are so boring (though, in fact, they are); rather, because the pharmaceutical hype-sters are back on parade once again.

Plaques and Tangles, Amyloid deposits and Apo-E: Who can keep them straight? Unless you are a researcher, all you really need to know is how to diagnose dementia, and how to dose the acetylcholinesterase inhibitor du jour.

We'd all like to escape dementia in our old age. Over the past decade, numerous large scale epidemiological studies have been published singing the praises of a variety of agents that might prevent or delay dementia.

Lamictal (lamotrigine) has been approved! The only problem is that few people can quite comprehend what it's been approved for.

Topamax (topiramate), oddly enough, is a derivative of fructose. It is strange that one of the very few psychotropics to cause weight loss is closely related to sugar, but there you have it. It is only approved as adjunctive therapy for seizure treatment by the FDA.

Suddenly, we all have a colleague who is prescribing Trileptal (oxcarbazepine) for bipolar disorder, and who is claiming to have fabulous success.

Suddenly, it seems that everybody and their cousin is asking us if they have bipolar disorder. A few years ago, bipolar disorder was the ignored orphan diagnosis in psychiatry. However, now that various patented molecules have been proven effective, industry money is flying into efforts to publicize the diagnosis, and it's clearly working.

It's an amazing metal. Not only does it treat acute mania, prevent recurrences, and treat refractory depression, but when consumed as LiCl, it tastes pretty good on vegetables. Or at least it did before the 1950s, when it was dropped from the list of acceptable salt-substitutes for hypertensives because of a nasty tendency to cause toxicity.