Harvard Mental Health Letter articles from June 2004

Harvard Mental Health Letter archives from June 2004

What is supportive psychotherapy?
June 1, 2004... Supportive therapy is sometimes said to be a name for what every good psychotherapist does most of the time, often without acknowledging it and without knowing how it is done. The dictionary defines "supportive" in the medical sense as "serving...

Schizoaffective disorder.
June 1, 2004... The long, clumsy name of schizoaffective disorder is an attempt to describe a malady that mixes two kinds of mental illness usually thought to be completely different. Schizophrenia and affective (mood) disorders, according to most views, not...

Is psychotherapy a placebo?
June 1, 2004... In clinical trials that test the therapeutic effect of a drug, a control group takes a placebo -- an inert pill that cannot be distinguished from the active drug. Ideally, the placebo treatment has all the features of the drug treatment except...

The sadness and pain of rejection.
June 1, 2004... Everyone is familiar with it, but studies suggest that being left out or abandoned is even sadder than most people think and may be read by the brain as a form of physical pain. One study shows that personal rejection and other blows to...

Monitoring Lonely Hearts.
June 1, 2004... Many studies have found that social isolation and lack of social support (that is, help that a person can count on from others) raise the risk of ill health and mortality, especially from heart disease. Some research suggests that loneliness,...

What do we know about antidepressants and suicide risk?
June 1, 2004... Q What is the significance of the FDA's advisory about the use of antidepressant medications? Should people be more concerned about the risk of suicide and more cautious about starting one of these drugs? A Depression is a serious illness...