Depression
In a Personal View recently published in the British Medical Journal Martha Balinska aims to differentiate between “existential hardship and overt mental illness“: Someone with major depressive disorder or psychosis is not going to get better simply by meditating or going for a brisk walk. The problem may be semantics. Speaking of mental illness rather than disease is […]
Following 7 years of writing Bruce Springsteen has released his autobiography Born to Run, in which the singer voices his battle with depression. Lifting the curtain on his demons Springsteen recounts how his father had a mental illness, and didn’t come to realise the gravity of his depression until later in life with him entering a period of major depression in his 60s. “I couldn’t […]
Winners of the NCHD poster presentation and the Faculty of Addiction Psychiatry Essay Competition were congratulated at the Spring Conference 2016 for the usual high standards and prizes awarded to NCHD Research Prize Poster 2016 – Dr Erik Kolshus, Dept. of Old Age Psychiatry, Limerick Mental Health Services & Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience […]
In the 1980s I was a medical house officer in a regional hospital. Caring for patients with self -harm was a disturbing existential experience for a young doctor who had seen just enough of death to wonder why anyone would try to take their own life. I remember carrying out a medical procedure for a […]
The following is a letter sent to the Irish Independent from Prof Brendan Kelly Sir – Your news report under the heading, ‘Mentally ill still forced to endure shock treatment,’ (Sunday Independent, 15 November), dealt with whether it should be possible for a person with impaired mental capacity to receive ECT without consent. Most mental […]
The College of Psychiatrists of Ireland welcome the amendment to mental health legislation by the Dáil last night (8/12/15) which sees the deletion of the word ‘unwilling’ with regard to the administration of Electro-Convulsive Therapy (ECT). This long awaited amendment to the Mental Health Act 2001 will end the legal basis to administer ECT to […]