To all my devoted readers: Welcome to the inaugural issue of the CHPR. This is my fourth CME newsletter, and I wanted to share with you why we’re launching this product. Some of you know that over the past couple of years I have been working full time as the director of inpatient psychiatry at a community hospital just outside of Boston. I spend my days helping the toughest and neediest patients I’ve ever seen in my career—and I love it! These are people who are afflicted with serious mental illness, and whose lives are a nightmare of delusions, suicidality, substance use—and often agitation and violence. I’ve had chairs thrown at me. I’ve had patients who have swallowed pencils and eye-glasses. Consulting on the medical floors, I’ve managed delirious patients who are refusing dialysis and are close to dying of uremia. The daily professional challenges are enormous—and I decided we owe it to our readers to present the latest techniques for helping our sickest patients.

So how is it CHPR different from our other newsletters? Whereas our other publications emphasize outpatient practice, the focus of CHPR is on hospital psychiatry, including inpatient units, emergency rooms, and consult liaison work. Beyond that, we have largely kept our usual format—incisive interviews with experts in the field, practical reviews of clinical topics, and summaries of the latest clinical trials pertaining to hospital psychiatry. Luckily, I was able to recruit a long-time Carlat Report subscriber to edit this new journal—Victoria Hendrick, director of inpatient psychiatry at a large UCLA hospital.

Dr. Hendrick is a clinical professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and is the director of inpatient psychiatry at Olive View – UCLA Medical Center, where she carries a caseload of patients and provides teaching and supervision for medical students and psychiatry residents. After completing medical school and psychiatric residency at UCLA, she spent several years working as a principal investigator and co-investigator on N.I.M.H. funded research studies. She has authored or co-authored over 75 research papers, editorials, books and other publications, including several chapters in Uptodate on topics in women’s mental health and perinatal psychiatry. She has a long-standing interest in the needs of severely mentally ill patients from underserved populations and has worked in community mental health settings her entire career.

I hope you enjoy this exciting new venture, and please drop me a line when you have a chance to let me know how you like it and what topics you’d like to see covered.

Sincerely,

Daniel Carlat, MD