Major Depressive Disorder

Specific treatments are needed to target irritability, according to presenters at the American Society of Clinical Psychopharmacology Annual Meeting.

Gina Sequeira, MD, MS, is worried that an increasing number of states are proposing legislation that would ban access to gender-affirming health care for minors, even when they have parental consent.

“We have known for quite some time that people who receive treatment for mental disorders often stop one kind of treatment and then start another, presumably searching for help that they did not receive from the first treatment provider,” Ronald C. Kessler, PhD, of the department of health care policy at Harvard Medical School, told Healio Psychiatry. “We wanted to know how long it took typical patients to find helpful treatment and how often patients never found helpful treatment.”

Measures of depression symptom severity, employment status and refractoriness appeared to predict outcomes of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation, or rTMS, among individuals with major depressive disorder, according to an analysis of a randomized noninferiority trial published in EClinicalMedicine.

Lung cancer remains the No. 1 cause of cancer-related death worldwide.

Major depressive disorder exhibits spatially convergent structural and functional brain abnormalities, suggesting replicable neuroimaging features associated with the disorder, according to results of a meta-analysis published in American Journal of Psychiatry. This association goes beyond the transdiagnostic effects reported in previous meta-analyses and supports research focused on brain regions linked to depression, researchers noted.

Study findings published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry suggest that the severity of depressive symptoms may be more accurate in predicting suicidal ideation than hopelessness. It was the top story in psychiatry last week.

Patient response to antidepressants in major depressive disorder may be systematically associated with individual differences beyond placebo effects or statistical factors, according to results of a meta-analysis published in JAMA Psychiatry.

Women with anxiety, depression and trauma were more likely to use cannabis during pregnancy, according to research published in JAMA Network Open.

Hopelessness is likely a driving factor for suicidal ideation in patients with depressive disorder, largely because it covaries with depressive symptoms, according to study findings published in Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. However, researchers noted that severity of depressive symptoms may predict suicidal ideation more accurately than hopelessness.