Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “diagnosis”
Bipolar disorder is a mental health condition that causes extreme mood swings, from manic highs to depressive lows. It can be a difficult condition to diagnose, as the symptoms can overlap with other conditions, such as depression, anxiety, ADHD, etcetera. A new study from the University of Cambridge suggests that some day a blood test could help to diagnose bipolar …
Adult ADHD is not the same as childhood ADHD. Most people with adult ADHD never had childhood ADHD and most people with childhood ADHD never will have adult ADHD. This past year what was long thought to be known about adult ADHD turned out not to be true. Indeed, up until DSM-V adult ADHD could not be diagnosed unless someone …
Bipolar or unipolar depression: How to distinguish between these two conditions, which can have very different treatment response remains a difficult question without really satisfying answers. As noted in the picture to the right, misdiagnosis is common and can have serious consequences. An article in European Psychiatry adds to the literature pointing to certain features that increase the odds that someone …
How many times has a new patient in the clinic asked, “isn’t there a blood test for depression?” Always in the past we had to say that there were no reliable tests that could identify depression. There was some evidence that functional brain imaging could do so but the technique was expensive and experimental. In an article published in the …
Treatment of depression in patients with depression or bipolar is often complicated. If medications are prescribed, will they make mood symptoms worse, or have other significant adverse effects? And yet fatigue is common in people with a history of depression (it occurs in up to 10% of the general population and is much more common in women, who have a …
Tom Insel, the Director of the National Institute for Mental Health, to celebrate the release of DSM5 in May of 2013, famously announced that the manual was already irrelevant to psychiatric research. This quote from Psychology Today captures the moment fairly well. Just two weeks before DSM-5 is due to appear, the National Institute of Mental Health, the world’s largest funding agency …
