André Tomlin summarises the second National Audit of Schizophrenia, which highlights that many people with schizophrenia are still not getting the high quality psychological and medical treatment they deserve.
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As you know, we don’t normally blog about editorials on the Learning Disability Elf site, but this is on an important issue that affects a lot of people and we were keen to draw attention to the considered thoughts of the authors. We have posted many times in the past about the evidence base for [read the full story…]
A new study finds that psychiatric medications are implicated in many adverse drug events treated in US emergency departments. Nearly 1 in 10 of all adverse drug event visits to emergency departments are due to psychiatric drugs, including antidepressants, antipsychotics, lithium salts, sedatives, anxiolytics and stimulants.
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Shared decision making is now commonplace, but will this approach ever be fully embraced in relation to antipsychotic prescribing? Liz Hughes reports on a recent qualitative study of consultant psychiatrists’ experiences that sheds some light on the issue.
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Psychiatrist Andrés Fonseca considers how his clinical practice should change, after reading a systematic review and meta-analysis of drug treatment for neuropsychiatric symptoms in Alzheimer’s disease
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John Baker reports on the first population based report of the positive effects of antipsychotic medication and mood stabilisers on reducing the risk of a conviction for violent crime, published in the Lancet in May.
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Alex Langford summarises a relatively large and pragmatic study, which provides firm evidence that the newer antipsychotic, Paliperidone, is no better at preventing relapse or controlling psychotic symptoms than its decades-old comparator, Haloperidol.
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This is a dilemma I frequently face when I am called out to see someone with dementia on the ward or living in a nursing home. On the one hand I am thinking that anything I use can potentially have serious side-effects and will probably lead to increased health risks and increased mortality. On the [read the full story…]
Schizophrenia is a complex disorder (or, more likely, group of disorders) that has reality distortion at its core. Efforts to establish the cause of schizophrenia have been ongoing for more than a century, and many models have come and gone in that time (not for nothing has schizophrenia been called ‘the graveyard of neuropathologists’ (Plum, [read the full story…]
Schizophrenia is a crippling condition characterised by psychotic experiences such as delusions and hallucinations. It can be hugely debilitating for the patient and their family and it can also be an enormous challenge for psychiatrists and other health and social care professionals who are responsible for providing care and support to the service user. Currently, [read the full story…]
