February 2008
The Vanderbilt physician who in the late 1980s established the antipsychotic drug clozapine as the gold standard for treating patients with treatment-resistant schizophrenia has improved on his own research.
Herbert Meltzer, M.D., director of the Schizophrenia Program in the Department of Psychiatry, and colleagues have shown that the success of clozapine in treating this population was not due to the unique pharmacologic features of the drug itself, but the fact that it was used at higher doses than what is used to treat patients with schizophrenia who respond well to antipsychotic drugs. Clozapine is rarely used for the 70 percent of patients whose psychotic symptoms respond well to a wide array of other antipsychotic drugs. [continue reading…]
First Canadian study to examine mental health among armed forces and barriers to help
Mental disorders ranging from depression to alcoholism need to be de-stigmatized among military personnel to encourage troops to seek support when needed, according to a national investigation published in the February edition of the research journal, Medical Care
“Our findings show more than half of the military members with a mental disorder do not use any of the mental health services available to them,” says lead author Deniz Fikretoglu, an expert in posttraumatic stress disorder, as well as a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University and the Douglas Mental Health University Institute. [continue reading…]
Don’t bother trying to persuade your boss of a new idea while he’s feeling the power of his position – new research suggests he’s not listening to you.“Powerful people have confidence in what they are thinking. Whether their thoughts are positive or negative toward an idea, that position is going to be hard to change,” said Richard Petty, co-author of the study and professor of psychology at Ohio State University.
