Antidepressants are effective against depression in patients suffering from physical illnesses, according to a new systematic review by Cochrane researchers at King's Health Partners Academic Health Sciences Centre in the UK. The researchers found the drugs were more effective than placebos at treating depression in these patients...

Combining the antidepressant sertraline with the alcohol dependence treatment naltrexone produced a 54 percent abstinence rate in patients with both major depression and alcohol dependence, whereas the rates were only 21 to 28 percent for patients taking a placebo, sertraline only, or naltrexone only...

News outlets report on new trends in health insurance for employers. The Washington Post: "Most big employers plan to shift a larger share of health-care costs to their workers next year, according to a survey to be released Thursday. ...

A study published in the current issue of Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics addresses the role of personality factors in moderating treatment response in depression...

Schools are typically on guard against students who bully by inflicting repeated violence on other students. But technology has given rise to a relatively new form of bullying which inflicts emotional harm in a stealth manner, working through Web sites, chat rooms, e-mail, cell phones and instant messaging...

A new study suggests a trend toward developing hyperactivity among typically developing elementary-school-aged siblings of autistic preschoolers and supports the notion that mothers of young, autistic children experience more depression and stress than mothers with typically developing children...

Some anti-depressant drugs are associated with an increased chance of developing cataracts, according to a new statistical study by researchers at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute and McGill University...

A one-page, 27-item questionnaire that is available free online is a valid and effective tool to help primary care doctors screen patients for four common psychiatric illnesses, a study led by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researchers concludes. Results of the My Mood Monitor (M-3) checklist study are published in the March/April 2010 issue of Annals of Family Medicine...

Community support groups can reduce neonatal mortality, and lower rates of maternal depression-provided that the population coverage is wide enough and the programmes are appropriately designed. These are the conclusions of two Articles, published Online First in The Lancet. Participatory women's groups have shown promise in trials in Nepal, reducing neonatal mortality by about one-third...

Women's community groups have had a dramatic effect on reducing neonatal mortality rates in some of the poorest areas on India, according to a study published in the journal the Lancet. The groups provide a cost-effective intervention with added benefits such as reducing significantly maternal depression and improving decision-making amongst the women...

Adults who have both diabetes and major depression are more than twice as likely to develop dementia, compared to adults with diabetes only, according to a study published in the recent Journal of General Internal Medicine. Dementia is the progressive decline of thinking and reasoning abilities...

Lundbeck Inc. has announced the presentation of results from an open-label extension study of Xenazine® (tetrabenazine) for the treatment of chorea associated with Huntington's disease (HD)...

Psychosurgery is making a comeback. Recently published case series have shown encouraging results of so-called deep brain stimulation (DBS) in treatment-resistant obsessive-compulsive disorder, depressive disorders, and Tourette syndrome...

A daily dose of vitamin D may just be what Chicagoans need to get through the long winter, according to researchers at Loyola University Chicago Marcella Niehoff School of Nursing (MNSON). This nutrient lifts mood during cold weather months when days are short and more time is spent indoors...

Counselling Suicidal Clients by Andrew Reeves, from University of Liverpool Counselling Service, is a new title for counselling practitioners published today by SAGE. This title addresses the important professional considerations when working with clients who are suicidal...

Conventional antidepressant treatments generally require three to four weeks to become effective, thus the discovery of treatments with a more rapid onset is a major goal of biological psychiatry. The first drug found to produce rapid improvement in mood was the NMDA glutamate receptor antagonist, ketamine...

The next advance in treating major depression may relate to a group of brain chemicals that are involved in virtually all our brain activity, according to a study published in Biological Psychiatry. The study is co-authored by Drs. Andrea J. Levinson and Zafiris J. Daskalakis of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH)...

Obesity appears to be associated with an increased risk of depression, and depression also appears associated with an increased risk of developing obesity, according to a meta-analysis of previously published studies in the March issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals...

Research at the Sam and Rose Stein Institute for Research on Aging at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine suggests a novel route to improving the symptoms of subsyndromal depression (SSD) in seniors through the regular use of "exergames" entertaining video games that combine game play with exercise...

The human brain excels at using past experiences to make predictions about the future. However, the world around us is constantly changing, and new events often violate our logical expectations. "We know these unexpected events are more likely to be remembered than predictable events, but the underlying neural mechanisms for these effects remain unclear," says lead researcher, Dr...