Word: nimh
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...good as drug therapy in treating depression. Exultant scientists at the National Institute of Mental Health, which funded the project, hail it as a "landmark," and Psychiatrist Jerome Frank calls it the "standard against which all other psychotherapy research will be assessed." Says Herbert Pardes, former director of NIMH: "It is unique in terms of size and the elegance of its construction...
...only a six-page summary of initial findings has been released. Describing the interim results last week at the American Psychiatric Association's annual meeting in Washington, the coordinator of the project at NIMH, Irene Elkin, said there is no evidence that drug treatment is any more effective than cognitive behavior therapy or interpersonal psychotherapy. Those therapies were chosen because they are commonly used for depression and can be readily taught to therapists from official manuals. Says Morris Parloff, a retired psychologist who helped frame the study: "We picked them because they are brief and very definable, from different approaches...
...rise and psychotherapists are under heavy pressure from health- insurance programs to find quick and cheap treatments that work. Though the art and experience of the therapist may be crucial to a cure, these are factors that hardly lend themselves to scientific analysis, which is one reason that the NIMH study chose talk therapies that can be packaged and dispensed relatively easily. The 18 therapists who conducted the two talk therapies were certified in those treatments after two years of training...
...treatment. Many depressions wax and wane or clear up on their own, and the sheer act of deciding to enter a therapy program may sometimes be more beneficial than the therapy itself. The way to catch any such brief psychological boost is in follow-up studies. The NIMH project is testing patients after six, twelve and 18 months, with the end of the tests due by December. Three-quarters of these results are already in, but Elkin has not looked at them yet. She says she has her hands full just examining the treatment data...
...illness in college-aged people, according to the study, are related to drug and alcohol dependence. Phobias and severe depressions are also relatively common among this age group. More distressing, however, are signs that these kinds of problems are on the rise. According to the results of another NIMH study, the number of suicides among college-aged Americans has tripled in the last 25 years alone. Experts say the reason behind the increasingly high rate of mental disorders among young people are still unclear...