Reidbord's Reflections

Polypharmacy — Sloppy thinking in psychiatry 2

Steven P Reidbord, MD — Sat, 12 May 2012 22:56:41 +0000

My second post in this series on sloppy thinking in psychiatry is devoted to polypharmacy, the medical term for prescribing multiple medications at once, especially for the same problem. Polypharmacy is at best a risk thoughtfully taken because nothing simpler and safer will do. At worst it’s a dangerous error, exposing patients to unnecessary [...]

Chemical imbalance — Sloppy thinking in psychiatry 1

Steven P Reidbord, MD — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 22:33:12 +0000

There’s a lot of sloppy thinking in my field. This troubles me. While psychiatry inevitably deals with the speculative and poorly understood, this surely cannot excuse faulty logic and intellectual laziness. Worse yet, this laxity of thought extends across the field, from biological psychiatry to psychotherapy, and from the general to the specific. My next [...]

Jury duty, a psychiatric perspective

Steven P Reidbord, MD — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 04:20:52 +0000

I just finished a day of jury service in criminal court, and have some thoughts about the whole process. Some relate to me as a psychiatrist, some are more generic. I’ll start by admitting I’ve never served as a juror in an actual trial. Doing so would interest me, and I do appreciate the [...]

The commodification of psychiatry

Steven P Reidbord, MD — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 07:37:31 +0000

Several recent articles, blogs, and even my participation in HealthTap (discussed in my last two posts) have led me to think about how psychiatry, and mental health treatment generally, are increasingly viewed as commodities. In the language of economics, a commodity is a physical good, such as food, grain, or metal, which is interchangeable with [...]

Review of HealthTap

Steven P Reidbord, MD — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 10:28:46 +0000

As posted below, I joined HealthTap a month ago, impressed with its vision of bringing real medical expertise to the public in a Yahoo Answers type format. Since then I’ve participated actively. As of today, I’ve answered 40 questions, and I’ve been thanked by 30 members — it’s tempting to call them patients, but [...]

healthTap

Steven P Reidbord, MD — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 17:51:09 +0000

Last week I was invited to join an online service called healthTap. I signed up this weekend, and have been enjoying it so far. It’s a free membership site where users ask brief medical/health related questions. The questions are then answered, also briefly, by one or more physicians in the “Medical Expert Network.” Each [...]

Movie review: “A dangerous method”

Steven P Reidbord, MD — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 08:54:13 +0000

Tonight I was invited to an advance screening of “A Dangerous Method,” a film about the early days of psychoanalysis. It stars Keira Knightley, Michael Fassbender, and Viggo Mortensen, and will be in wide release by Sony Pictures Classics this month. The invitation was extended to Psychology Today bloggers, among others, in the hope we’ll [...]

Efficacy of dynamic psychotherapy

Steven P Reidbord, MD — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 01:53:11 +0000

The following post is an adaptation of an argument I presented on Sacramento Street Psychiatry, my blog on the Psychology Today website. As usual, I welcome your comments.

Western medicine’s great strides are largely due to understanding etiology (the biological basis of disease), defining a nosology (a system of categorizing diseases), and testing treatments [...]

“Do you analyze everyone you meet?”

Steven P Reidbord, MD — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 15:38:56 +0000

People sometimes wonder whether I “analyze” everyone I meet. This is usually asked with some fear that as a psychiatrist I can “see right through them” and instantly know things about their innermost thoughts they’d prefer to keep hidden. Although this is true (just kidding), I try to reassure them with the following analogy.

[...]

Therapy for therapists

Steven P Reidbord, MD — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 21:50:55 +0000

Tara Parker-Pope of the New York Times blog Well featured my prior post, on the feelings some patients have as they imagine whether their psychotherapists have been in therapy themselves. My post was about patients’ fantasies, not the reality of therapy for therapists. Nonetheless, many of the comments argued for the great value of [...]

“Have you seen a therapist yourself?”

Steven P Reidbord, MD — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 02:02:14 +0000

Recently a patient asked whether I’d ever been in therapy myself. Without answering his question directly (see my post on psychotherapist disclosure and privacy), I replied that many of us have, and asked what it meant to him. It would be a bad sign: “How can you help if you need help too?” We [...]

Do antidepressants work?

Steven P Reidbord, MD — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 01:04:36 +0000

There is an active debate underway in the popular literature about whether antidepressant medications actually do anything chemically helpful for depressed patients. No one doubts that many patients report feeling better, and that most evidence less depression on standardized rating scales, following treatment. But much of that improvement appears to be due to psychological [...]