In January of this year, the FDA approved the stimulant lisdexamfetamine (Vyvanse) as the first drug with an indication for binge eating disorder (BED). Patients are hearing the buzz and may be asking you to prescribe it, but you may have some questions first.

Assurex Health recently sent me an email inviting me to dine at Legal Seafood to learn about “Clinical Applications of Psychiatric Pharmacogenetics.” I didn’t go, but increasingly I am hearing from colleagues about their experiences at these dinner programs: “What do you think about this GeneSight test? The data looked pretty impressive at this dinner.”

There are plenty of ways that we use technology in psychiatric practice these days—including e-prescribing, electronic health records, referring patients to websites for psychoeducation, etc. But when was the last time you referred a patient to their computer for psychotherapy? Well, it may be time to consider it.

There’s a new medication on the market for the treatment of dementia—the first to come along in several years.

If you’re like most psychiatrists, you get your fair share of older folks who come into the office complaining of difficulties with sleep or with significant symptoms of anxiety.

With nine other atypical antipsychotics already on the market (some of which are available as generics), did we really need another one? Given the pesky side effects of antipsychotics, maybe we did. Let’s take a look at what we know so far about Latuda (lurasidone) in an effort to figure out how to incorporate it into our clinical toolbox. Latuda was first approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for use in schizophrenia in late 2010.

Learn about the new emphasis on community functioning for patients with schizophrenia, in an interview with Dost Ongur, MD, PhD, chief of the psychotic disorders division at McLean Hospital and an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

Since I last wrote about MOC in 2010, the most relevant news has not been within the program itself, but in the increasingly rancorous reaction against its requirements from physicians of all specialties. Regardless, it doesn’t look like ABPN is going to be ditching MOC any time soon, so this article pretty much lays out what you have to do, without (much) editorializing.

In 2006, an FDA panel recommended all manufacturers of stimulants to add a “black box” warning about an increased risk of “serious cardiovascular events.”

Nuedexta is a combination of dextromethorphan (DM) and quinidine sulfate. You might reasonably ask why these two agents would have ever been considered as a treatment for PBA.