Conversation with Kathy Leichter, Director of Here One Day We had the absolute pleasure of talking with director Kathy Leichter about her experience of making her movie, Here One Day. Here One Day is an intimate look into her mother’s experience with Bipolar Disorder and as well as her own, as her daughter. Question: How did you come up with …
Telemedicine Interest
A survey by mental health systems reviewer Software Advice revealed that 75% of patients who have never used telemedicine said they were interested in trying such services in place of an in-person medical visit, as reported by this article on iHealthBeat.org. Of those 75% of patients, 39% identified as being “extremely interested” or “very interested.” 71% of the overall respondents …
Vyvanse for Binge Eating Disorder
This past week the FDA approved the first drug for Binge-Eating Disorder. “Binge eating can cause serious health problems and difficulties with work, home, and social life,” said FDA Division of Psychiatry Products Director Mitchell Mathis, M.D. “The approval of Vyvanse provides physicians and patients with an effective option to help curb episodes of binge eating.” The drug was reviewed under the FDA’s …
NMDA Receptor and Depression
A new drug that stimulates the glycine site of NMDA receptors had rapid antidepressant effects in the just released results of a phase II clinical trial. The drug substantially reduced depression symptoms, with no severe side effects. The NMDA receptor has 2 sites that are involved in its activation. One site is stimulated by glutamate or aspartate. Another site is stimulated by glycine. For …
Chronic Pain and Depression
Chronic pain and depression often co-occur in the relationship between the two experiences can be hard to separate. An important article just published in Biological Psychiatry (Barthas, et al) identifies 2 sets of circuits in the brain for processing pain: One is located in the anterior cingulate cortex and seems to be involved in the emotional experience of pain, the …
Fee Changes
It is time to update our fee list. The last time we revised our fees was in November of 2013. In preparation for this task we reviewed data on health care costs in the Bay Area from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and we compared our fees to average fees in San Francisco for the same services (CPT codes) using …
LOCUS and Level of Care
LOCUS© and CALOCUS© instruments were developed by the American Association of Community Psychiatrists (AACP). They are clinical tools that evaluate and determine level of care placements for psychiatric and addiction services for both adult and child/adolescent populations. We use these tools when we are working with the patient or family who is seriously symptomatic, failing to improve despite aggressive outpatient treatment, …
ECT for Bipolar Depression
ECT for bipolar depression may be much more effective than psychiatric medications. That is the conclusion of the recently published, well designed study of 73 in patients with bipolar depression who had failed adequate trials with mood stabilizers. In the initial 2 months after the patients were randomized to either ECT or algorithm based pharmacotherapy (psychiatric medications carefully managed and …
Bipolar Depression
The recent presentation that I gave at UCSF on this topic allowed me to review all of the controlled clinical trials related to the treatment of bipolar depression. In a follow-up post I plan on talking about some of the exciting new developments that suggest that we will soon, and to some extent do already, have some very promising approaches …
Hidden Work
The hidden work that goes into even a modest website such as our own can be huge. I am going to reward myself for a weekend of work by mentioning some of the stuff we have been working on – Keywords – The miracle of modern searches rests in part on the huge work that webmasters put into indexing all …