Excerpted from a past issue of The Carlat Addiction Treatment Report, Matthew Goldenberg, DO, Founder of Professionals Health Solutions and assistant professor of psychiatry at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, offers the following advice:Enhance your patients’ courage. Many people with SUDs may not think of themselves as brave, but it takes guts...

In The Carlat Child Psychiatry Report, Elizabeth Tien, MD, a child & adolescent psychiatrist at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, NY, offers off-label advice on prescribing medications for children with PTSD. Below are some general tips, but to get a handy table on which meds to choose and how to...

First developed in the 1920s, EEG entails applying electrodes to the scalp’s surface to measure electricity generated by neural activity. The brain works primarily via action potentials that lead to the release of neurotransmitters into synaptic clefts. Although EEG can’t detect the tiny amount of electricity produced by the individual...

The following are some recommendations on good medication practice from child psychiatrist Mark Chenven, MD, who offered his expertise in The Carlat Child Psychiatry Report:Start low, go slow: Most side effects are dose related, so gradual up-titration is simple common sense. This allows for the body’s homeostatic and regulatory mechanisms...

In The Carlat Addiction Treatment Report, David Rosengren, PhD, President of the Prevention Research Institute, gives the following tips on how to conduct motivational interviewing:Be curious, not an expert.Training and expertise can get in the way of our really hearing the client’s story. For example, a client says, “I don’t...

There are some ways to help you assess the type of anxiety that leads to inattention. Consider the following tips, which we’ve excerpted from an article from The Carlat Child Psychiatry Report newsletter:Catalog. Work with the child to develop a list of activities in which the child is calm and...

For patients who smoke intermittently, you should start with nicotine replacement therapies, such as nicotine lozenges or gum, which can be used on a PRN basis.Patients who smoke more frequently, such as several times per day, will need consistent nicotine replacement from a patch to prevent the peaks and troughs...

Just getting adolescents to even find their medicine or remember to take it is a big challenge, says Jess Shatkin, MD, Professor of Adolescent Psychiatry and Pediatrics at the New York University School of Medicine, and author of “Born to be Wild: Why Teens Take Risks, and How We Can...

Although there’s been a lot of discussion about gabapentin’s abuse potential, gabapentin substance use disorders are pretty rare, with one study finding that only 2% of 44,148 patients using gabapentin alone met criteria for sustained overuse (Peckham et al, Pharmacotherapy, in press). The one area where you should show caution,...

In many cases, it will be immediately clear when an aggressive patient needs to be sent to the ER, says Ruth Gerson, MD, Director at the Bellevue Hospital Children’s Comprehensive Psychiatric Emergency Program in New York, NY. If a patient is hurting people, including himself, and you determine a clear...