Clinical Vignette Your patient, Sara, who you have been seeing in weekly therapy for a year, had a setback recently and was briefly hospitalized. She has now been released from the local psychiatric unit with a new medication plan. Her prescription for fluoxetine (Prozac; 60 mg/daily) was abruptly discontinued and replaced with a different antidepressant, […]
The idea that medications hold the key to repairing all manner of psychological and physical discomforts has been around for many decades. The acceptance of this idea has been reflected in steady, consistent sales data. For example, between 1960 and 1980 the sale of prescription drugs remained at a relatively stable percentage of the United […]
The debate within the field of psychology regarding the right to prescribe psychotropic medication has persisted for the past two decades, with the American Psychological Association (APA) officially considering the matter beginning in 1989.[1] Recent studies estimate that over 44 percent of Americans are prescribed at least one drug, and that 16.5 percent take at […]
Chronic pain, albeit a common medical complaint, is notoriously difficult to both define and study. Though as many as 35 percent of respondents to surveys report persistent pain on at least a weekly basis, pain is by definition subjective and difficult to characterize accurately. The experience of pain and the tolerance for pain vary substantially […]