Word: treatments
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...rehabilitation of troubled teens has long been a contentious issue, pitting the individual needs of problem children and families against a system that does not typically give social workers adequate tools or resources to help. Often, the treatment of difficult or drug-using teens occurs en masse - in residential homes, for example - but instead of scaring kids straight, the group experience tends to glamorize delinquency and drug use. (Read "Teens Behaving Badly...
...reveals that antidepressants - the most commonly prescribed class of medicine in the U.S. - are being used to treat not just depression and anxiety but disorders ranging from back pain to sleeplessness. The authors also underline the degree to which pharmacology often supplants psychotherapy as the primary treatment for mental ailments...
...have contributed to the increased use of antidepressant medications. Perhaps most important, major depression may have become more common ... [several antidepressants] were approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat depressive and anxiety disorders ... [and] improving public attitudes toward seeking mental health in general, increasing rates of treatment in individuals with major depression, and growing public acceptance of a biological cause of depression may also have contributed to increasing antidepressant use." (Read "Why Antidepressants Don't Live Up to the Hype...
...strategies for coping with disorders like depression are changing: "Among antidepressant users, the percentage who also received antipsychotic medications increased, whereas the percentage who also underwent psychotherapy declined. Together with an increase in the number of antidepressant prescriptions per antidepressant user, these broad trends suggest that antidepressant treatment is occurring within a clinic context that places greater emphasis on pharmacologic rather than psychologic dimensions of care...
...major depression. Access to drugs that can alleviate serious disorders is improving, but the doctors doling them out are working outside their areas of expertise - about 80% of antidepressant patients are receiving care from someone other than a psychiatrist. "These trends vividly illustrate the extent to which antidepressant treatment has gained acceptance in the United States," the authors write. Problems that were once solved partly through hours of introspection on a shrink's couch are now considered curable with a simple pill. It's up to us to determine whether this represents a step forward or back...