Andrew Shepherd

Andrew Shepherd
Following completing his PhD Andrew has recently returned to full time clinical practice and is currently trying to acclimatise to life back within the NHS... He maintains his research interests and will take up a clinical lectureship post from February.

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Psychotherapy for depression in primary care. Better evidence please…

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Andrew Shepherd summarises a recent systematic review of the effectiveness of psychotherapy for depression in primary care, which contains a lot of data but leaves him feeling rather deflated.

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ECT for depression in the elderly

Depression and anxiety are quite common in people with dementia and mild cognitive impairment.

Andrew Shepherd reports on a post-hoc analysis of pre-existing trial data, which does little to convince him that ECT is a safe and effective treatment option for older people with severe depression.

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Family experiences of help seeking in first episode psychosis

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Andrew Shepherd explores the complex issue of families seeking help for first episode psychosis, investigated by researchers in a recent family narrative study, which concludes that help seeking attempts are often derailed by complex family responses to illness.

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Stigma in bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder: time for a cultural shift.

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Andrew Shepherd summarises a critical realist analysis that looks at experiences of stigma in people with bipolar disorder or borderline personality disorder. He concludes that a profound social change in public and professional attitudes is necessary before mental health stigma can be effectively eradicated.

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CBT versus psychodynamic psychotherapy for social anxiety disorder: long live the dodo or time for a change in research emphasis?

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Andrew Shepherd appraises a study of the long-term outcomes of psychodynamic therapy and cognitive-behavioral therapy in social anxiety disorder, which finds both therapies are efficacious in treating social anxiety disorder in the short- and long-term.

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Prison Officers as frontline mental health staff? Results of a prison-based ethnography

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Andrew Shepherd summarises an ethnography from the United States, which explores the relationships between Prison Officers in Correctional Institutions and Prisoners with mental health problems.

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Mentalization based treatment for borderline personality disorder: a pragmatic trial but with statistical uncertainty

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Andrew Shepherd summarises a matched control study that explores the effectiveness of day hospital Mentalization-Based Treatment for patients with severe Borderline Personality Disorder.

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Antidepressants, safety warnings and suicide risk in young people

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Andrew Shepherd reviews the recent controversial BMJ study that suggests the FDA black box warning about antidepressant use in young people, may have inadvertently caused an increase in suicidal behaviour. He finds it’s not quite that clear cut.

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Childhood abuse and adverse life events interact synergistically to produce a high risk for psychotic experiences

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This recent study concludes that childhood abuse creates an enduring vulnerability to psychosis that is realised in the event of exposure to further stressors and risk factors, such as separation, bereavement, or being involved in an accident or physical attack.

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Outcome and methodological comparisons in psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy meta-analyses

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Andrew Shepherd summarises a recent JAMA Psychiatry study looking at the efficacy of pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy for adult psychiatric disorders (and uses words like hubristic and existential quite a lot!)

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