However, those who deliver these services say it’s equally important that practitioners are also involved in the research component of their fields.

“When you look at modern medicine overall, it’s been research that’s been driving it,” said Dr. Martin Alda, a clinical psychiatrist and professor at Dalhousie University.

“Without it, Nova Scotia hospitals would still be needing hundreds of beds.”

This may result in less effective treatment of all associated conditions and may impact functional outcomes for geriatric patients with mood disorders, the researchers said.

Brittany L. Jordan Geriatric Psychiatry Research Program, McLean Hospital, Belmont, Maryland, and colleagues recruited 97 patients from a mood disorders research program at McLean Hospital.

A growing body of clinical data now suggests that an association may exist between obesity, mood, and anxiety disorders, even after demographics and comorbid conditions are controlled for.

Possible explanations for this association may include a common cause for these conditions such as negative early experiences or genetic predisposition, negative interactions brought on by obesity may cause mood or anxiety disorders, or that mood and anxiety disorders cause obesity. Psychotropic medications have also been shown to have an association with significant weight gain.

Called My Mood Monitor (M-3), the checklist includes 27 questions designed to screen for depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This study included 647 adults, aged 18 and older, who completed the questionnaire while waiting to see their doctor. The checklists were given to the patients’ doctors, who used the information to discuss emotional health with their patients.

The researchers found that the checklist was effective in screening for any mood or anxiety disorder 83 percent of the time and for a specific disorder 76 percent of the time. The findings are published in the March/April issue of the Annals of Family Medicine.

Shareef’s capital murder trial entered its third week of testimony in Cumberland County Superior Court.

Shareef, 31, has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to murder and attempted murder.

The paper showed a picture of a stone-faced Mark Becker, the 24-year-old Parkersburg man who was convicted last week of murder for shooting his former football coach, Ed Thomas. Iowans read about how Becker assassinated the coach, then screamed gibberish about Satan to the horrified high school students who saw the murder. The media reported how Becker’s defense lawyer tried in vain to blame the killing on the young man’s severe mental illness and the delusions it caused.

What the news stories didn’t provide, Miller said, was a complete picture of schizophrenia. It’s true that a few people with the mental disorder go out of control and commit horrible crimes, he said. But Miller and thousands of other Iowans who have schizophrenia live quiet, unremarkable lives. Few of them talk openly about their experiences, however, so the public learns about the disease only in extreme cases, such as Becker’s.

Twin sisters Leanne Knobloch of the University of Illinois and Lynne Knobloch-Fedders of The Family Institute at Northwestern University said more than three decades of research has shown that people with depression are less satisfied in their romantic relationships.

Relational uncertainty is a term to describe how sure individuals are about their perceptions of involvement in a relationship. It has three sources, the researchers said.

A new study proved that the My Mood Monitor (M-3) - an online one-page secure questionnaire used to self-gauge mood and “relative risk for depression, an anxiety disorder, bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)” - is a useful and effective diagnostic tool.

Researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine (UNC) published their findings in the March/April edition of Annals of Family Medicine, a peer-reviewed research journal.

Bradley Gaynes, M.D., M.P.H, associate professor of psychiatry at UNC, led the study and explained those “who suffer from depression and anxiety-related mental health disorders never receives treatment because they don’t understand what’s wrong, and when they go to their family doctor these treatable illnesses are too often missed.

“Diabetes alone has shown to be a risk factor for dementia, as has major depression by itself,” says lead author of the study, Dr. Wayne Katon, University of Washington (UW) professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. We wanted to determine the effects of both conditions – diabetes and major depression--occurring together. Our analysis suggests that major depression more than doubles the risk of dementia in adults with diabetes.”

Patients were enrolled in the study between2000 and 2002 and followed for five years. Of 455 patients, 7.9 percent of patients with major depression and diabetes were also diagnosed with dementia. Diabetes alone increases the odds of cognitive decline 40 to 100 percent.

After a lifetime of teaching English in high school, he wanted to write novels. But the tough city – made tougher by its grey, windy winters – upset those plans, thrusting Mr. Floody into depression and anxiety.

“It was interfering with my retirement that I had planned for 32 years,” he said. It was his first brush with mental illness, and, like most Canadians, when he decided he needed help, he turned to his family doctor.

“There is a reciprocal association over time between depression and obesity,” Dr. Floriana S. Luppino, of Leiden University Medical Center, the Netherlands, told Reuters Health by email.

Obesity, Luppino and colleagues found, increases the risk of depression in initially non-depressed individuals by 55 percent and depression increases the risk of obesity in initially normal-weight individuals by 58 percent.

Dr Diana Chan and Dr Lester Sireling, psychiatrists from the Royal College of Psychiatrists, have suggested that this increase could be due to the willingness of celebrities to discuss their mental health problems.

Stars such as Stephen Fry, Robbie Williams and Carrie Fisher have all voiced their personal experiences of mood disorders in the past. 

This fall, a small group of caregivers who for years had suffered alone in dealing with their children and grandchildren with mood disorders came together to support one another.

Facilitated by Lisa Ottenhoff, the confidential group meets the first Tuesday of each month from 6:30 to 8 p.m. at First Congregational Church, 145 Capital Ave. N.E.

We’ve become so obsessed with that question that it’s making us miserable, says psychotherapist Gary Greenberg.

Look at pop culture, says Greenberg, 52, who has worked as a therapist for 26 years: We are beset by messages from positive-thinking hucksters, New Age gurus, self-help authors, and prosperity theologians who tell us we are entitled to wealth and happiness - but only if we think positive. Be negative, and you’ll be inviting destruction and ruin.

Greenberg, author of the revelatory polemic Manufacturing Depression: The Secret History of a Modern Disease, says the self-help mania is another aspect of hyper-consumerism that encourages an “irrational exuberance” by promising products that will provide meaning to our lives.

Joseph Calabrese, MD, PhD, Mood Disorders Program, Case Western University School of Medicine, Cleveland, Ohio, and colleagues determined the efficacy of asenapine co-treatment with lithium or valproate in a 12-week primary study and a blinded extension study that followed for 40 weeks.

The primary-study endpoint was to evaluate the efficacy, safety, and tolerability of adjunctive asenapine for acute manic or mixed episodes in patients with bipolar disorder who incompletely responded to lithium or valproate monotherapy. The extension study had the same endpoints in addition to determining the maintenance of efficacy of adjunctive asenapine treatment.