Overview Suicide, or intentional self-harm with the intent of causing death, is the 11th leading cause of death in the United States, accounting for more than 40,000 deaths each year. Non-lethal self-inflicted injuries are even more prevalent, accounting for nearly…
Overview The medical equivalent of war is the care of the difficult patient. Doctors soldier steadily on through all kinds of clinical chores, arduous schedules, and “administrivia,” but when they get to the types of patients variously called “obnoxious,” “needy,”…
Overview Complementary and alternative medical (CAM) therapies constitute a diverse spectrum of practices and beliefs in current medical practice. The National Institutes of Health has defined CAM as “healthcare practices outside the realm of conventional medicine, which are yet to…
Overview Lifestyle choices are associated with the development of chronic non-communicable diseases (NCDs). Centuries ago, Hippocrates emphasized the power of exercise and nutrition; he noted, “If we could give every individual the right amount of nourishment and exercise, not too…
Overview The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health defines Mind–Body Medicine as an approach that “focuses on the interactions among the brain, mind, body, and behavior, and on the powerful ways in which emotional, mental, social, spiritual, and behavioral…
Overview Similar to adults, hospitalized children can develop psychiatric illness as a result of psychosocial stresses of hospitalization (e.g., loss of control, threat of illness, separation from caregivers), effects of general medical conditions (e.g., infections), use of medications or substances…
Overview The mental health professional in the general medical setting faces many challenges posed by co-morbid medical disorders and concurrent medications that hinder the detection of psychiatric symptoms and alter the effectiveness, tolerability, and safety of psychiatric drug treatment. In…
Overview Treatment options in neuropsychiatry include psychotherapy, psychopharmacology, and neuromodulation. This chapter focuses on neuromodulation, a group of device-based interventions able to modulate pathologically altered brain regions and circuits using electromagnetic energy or surgical ablation. Neuromodulation therapies (also known as…
Management of psychiatric illness in medically ill individuals requires knowledge of medicine and psychiatry as well as specialized psychotherapeutic techniques. In inpatient settings, challenges to compassionate psychological care are abundant (e.g., decreasing length of stays, severe medical and surgical illnesses,…
Overview Genetic syndromes are disorders with a characteristic set of features that are due to an underlying common genetic mechanism, either an individual genetic mutation or a chromosomal abnormality. This chapter provides a brief overview of the genetics of major…