For over 30 years researchers have found that people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia have, on average, differences on brain scans compared to people without. Not everybody with a diagnosis of schizophrenia will have these differences and it has not yet been possible to use brain scanning as a test to work out whether someone [read the full story…]
Antipsychotic medications are often the first line of treatment for schizophrenia and have been effective at treating florid symptoms such as delusions and hallucinations. Fluphenazine was one of the first antipsychotics to become available on the market and has now been appearing on prescriptions for over 5 decades. Despite the arrival of newer generations of [read the full story…]
Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) is a condition that has recently been given a significant amount of TV airplay and media coverage, perhaps most notably in the Channel 4 documentary Jon Richardson: A little bit OCD, which received mostly good reviews from mental health groups. Despite this reasonable public profile, our knowledge about the best way [read the full story…]
It is estimated that in UK, up to 200,000 people with learning disabilities are given anti-psychotic drugs, which can have powerful side effects, like risk of weight gain, impotence and strain to the cardiovascular system, and with little evidence of their efficacy in treating challenging behaviour. There are equal concerns about the use of anti-convulsant [read the full story…]
Schizophrenia is considered a chronic long-term debilitating condition, affecting about 1% of the population. There has been considerable debate about which of the anti-psychotic medications are the best treatments. The debate has usually been structured around typical (older) and atypical (newer) anti-psychotic medications. The revised NICE guidelines (2009) moved towards a more neutral stance between [read the full story…]
Bipolar disorder features as one of the top ten disabling disorders for working age adults. There are numerous risks including suicide, increased mortality and reduced social functioning associated with the disorder. Key to enabling recovery is preventing acute episodes from occurring, with each episode increasing the risk of future ones. Therefore ensuring long-term maintenance treatment [read the full story…]
Here at Mental Elf HQ we’re expanding our skill set to include economics. Understanding the best way to value health and health care, and improving health outcomes with budget constraints in mind, are the key pastimes of economics elves. We hope to bring you the latest economic evidence in the field of mental health and to [read the full story…]
Antipsychotics were discovered as an effective treatment for schizophrenia in the 1950s, but their use was expanded despite lack of supporting evidence, to treat other patient groups. This included treating aggression, agitation and other behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia (BPSD). There is evidence that these distressing symptoms can often be prevented or managed without [read the full story…]
People using antipsychotic drugs like chlorpromazine and haloperidol get [anticholinergic] side effects such as blurred vision, dry mouth and constipation but the proportion of people experiencing these is not clear. Past surveys are very old indeed, small and not really proper surveys at all. Their results had been perpetuated for decades without verification. They were [read the full story…]
Schizophrenia according to the NICE guidelines, is a relatively common illness and in the majority of cases takes a chronic course, requiring continued management and careful attention. In the treatment and management of schizophrenia, antipsychotic medications – like olanzapine, quetiapine or clozapine – are the first line intervention. Antipsychotics can be loosely divided into “first-generation” (“typical”) and [read the full story…]
