Rosalind McAlpine and Karel Kieslich summarise a recent systematic review which focuses on the rapid anti-suicidal ideation effect of ketamine.
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Wajeeha Raza and Peter Coventry review a retrospective cohort study exploring the association between air pollution exposure and mental health service use among individuals with first presentations of psychotic and mood disorders.
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Michael Ostacher critically appraises and summarises a recent Cochrane systematic review, which presents the latest best evidence on the efficacy of lamotrigine in the maintenance treatment of bipolar disorder.
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In their debut Mental Elf blog, Martin Knapp and Gloria Wong summarise a systematic review of cost-of-illness studies, which explores the distribution of the costs between different mental health and neurodevelopmental conditions.
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Emmeline Lagunes Cordoba and Magdalena Skowronska review a recent Swiss RCT, which found that crisis resolution teams led to fewer hospital days per patient, but did not prevent hospital admission entirely.
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Mina Fazel considers a recent systematic review of mood disorders in first-and second-generation immigrants.
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This study explores the prevalence of psychiatric disorder and comorbidity among a UK sample of young people with experience of homelessness. It finds an extremely high prevalence of mental illness, combined with low levels of mental health service use.
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Lithium is a medicine that has been used for over 50 years to treat depression and bipolar disorder. It comes in two forms that are used clinically: lithium carbonate and lithium citrate. A certain level of the drug is needed in the blood stream for it to be effective, but if the level rises too [read the full story…]
It has long been documented that there are clinical differences between depression and bipolar disorder, but to date there has been no reliable study that shows differences in structural brain abnormalities in the two disorders. A research team from the Institute of Psychiatry in London have published a meta analysis that investigates structural brain changes in [read the full story…]
