“Grief is not a disease, it’s necessary,” Kay Redfield Jamison, Ph.D., told a large and appreciative audience at APA’s 2012 annual meeting. She is a coauthor of Manic Depressive Illness: Bipolar Disorders and Recurrent Depression, the definitive book on the topic, and a best-selling memoir about her life experiences with mental illness, An Unquiet Mind. She gave a moving and eloquent presentation in which she described her perspective on the similarities and differences between grief and depression, having suffered the ravages of bipolar disorder as well as the 2002 loss of her husband. Read more.
Sports psychiatrists are developing new strategies for athletes and nonathletes to counteract the ways in which competitive pressure degrades quality of life and performance, according to David McDuff, M.D. McDuff is a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and author of Sports Psychiatry: Strategies for Life Balance & Peak Performance by American Psychiatric Publishing. Read more.
More than half of all psychiatric patients complain of disturbances of sleep and wakefulness. Sleep disorders are associated with impaired daytime functioning and predict a heightened vulnerability to psychiatric illness. They are also associated with physiological impairments and diminished lifespan. Their comorbid presence complicates psychiatric disorders, and their management may offer the potential for greater efficacy in the alleviation of emotional symptoms. These were some of the key points made by Karl Doghramji, M.D., a professor of psychiatry, neurology, and medicine at Thomas Jefferson University. Read more.