How fast do antidepressants act? It depends what’s being treated. Premenstrual irritability responds within hours.

Since I was a child with a severe case of what is known as attention-deficit disorder, I have been extremely interested in the new explosion in new cases and the sudden interest in new trends in diagnoses. The number of children categorized under this label are above 17 million cases, appearing to be one of the greatest mental health epidemic of our times. The question was whether there were any bases for this unique disorder and if so, what factors have predicted such a huge outbreak of cases.

If I prescribe an antidepressant, patients always ask, “How soon will it work?”

Would you feel like you'd still like to be president after you have just been liberated from six years of captivity?

Sometimes the most effective way to treat children is to work with their parents.

Do you sometimes wonder if your brain is slipping away? You
may be suffering from the downward spiral of Stress Storms.

Addressing this topic generally, the immortal Dagwood Bumstead once claimed: "You can't teach people to be lazy--either they have it, or they don't." So what is laziness anyway? Is it about being slow to do something (what we typically call procrastination)? . . . Or about doing something slowly? . . . Or about not doing it at all? . . . Or, finally, is it about not sufficiently wanting to do something? And if this last alternative is true, when we label someone lazy are we really talking about that person's being indolent, sluggish, or slothful? Or is there something else going on that hasn't yet been appreciated?

For the most part, men have two speeds -- neutral and pissed. My experience has taught me that the state of rage that plagues the majority of the male population is often covert depression manifesting as anger.

The better the quality of the research, the more likely it is to show that antidepressants work. This rule held up in a major study of medication and psychotherapy to prevent depression in stroke victims.

What makes for resilience?

Say you take two seemingly similar mice and humiliate them. One appears anxious. The other continues to behave normally. What distinguishes the two?

National Public Radio aired a segment on its May 6th 2008 broadcast of All Things Considered reporting that a major talking point at the American Psychiatric Association's 2008 National conference, going on now in Washington DC, is the over-diagnosis of Bi-Polar Disorder (BPD).

There’s major news on the antidepressant front, but it comes in an odd form: research on treating “lazy eyes” in rats. A study suggests that, yes, Prozac and similar medicines really do make the brain more flexible.

The New York Times science section today features an essay on the long-term use of antidepressants. The lead refers to the sort of question I introduced in Listening to Prozac: how do medications shape identity? But most of the piece concerns the biological effects of taking the drugs for years.

Is there such a thing as a “chemical imbalance,” a dysregulation of neurotransmitters in the brain that can be linked to mood disorders? A scientific overview this year in the New England Journal of Medicine attests to the vitality of a theory prematurely declared dead.

Do antidepressants work? They do. New evidence comes from a study of children and adolescents, patients in age groups where the efficacy of antidepressants has been hard to demonstrate. It’s just the sort of research that critics of drug trials ought to find convincing.

Americans, who buy every fraudulant seer huckster who comes down the pike, are great believers in science. Or are those two sides of the same coin?

When a satellite is launched into orbit, we do not expect the accompanying news story to note that while squarely in the minority, some still question the legitimacy of the notion that the earth is spheroidal. The same holds for the politics of space exploration. When NASA’s budget is debated, journalists do not seek comment from the Flat Earth Society. With mental health news, we’re halfway there.

From Peter D. Kramer: A follow-up on my postings about antidepressants and the studies that pharmaceutical houses submitted to the Food and Drug Administration . . .

Early this year, the New England Journal of Medicine showcased research concluding that when it came to trials of antidepressant drugs, only studies finding positive results were likely to find their way into print. This week, Eli Lilly cried foul.

Over time, how deadly is the combination of depression and heart attacks? A recent study that received attention in the media found no connection, in the long term, between depression and death in heart attack victims. But that study was followed almost immediately by another that found the combination of heart attack and depression to be especially lethal.