Hot MedFax

If you have an anxious child, chances are you've taken her to therapy, maybe even tried some meds.  But a disturbing new study has found that less than half of all kids treated for the condition get over it permanently. Fewer than one in two children and young adults treated for anxiety achieve long-term relief from symptoms, according to the findings of a study by investigators from the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center and five other institutions, as reported by newswise.com. “Our findings are encouraging in that nearly half of these children achieved significant improvement and were disease-free an average of six years after treatment, but at the same time we ought to look at the other half who didn’t fare so well and figure out how we can do better,” the Web site quotes lead investigator Golda Ginsburg, Ph.D., a psychologist at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center and professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.   “Just because a child respon

Would you be more likely to go to a therapist if you could do it over the phone?  I'm not talking about dial-a-shrink, but an actual appointment you had every week for an hour, just not in person but over the phone? "Teletherapy's" been around for a while.  I remember writing about it last year when it came to prisons (and really helped), but it's taken a while to get into the mainstream.  (I also remember reporting on all the dot coms who thought therapy could be done online, with patients -- or "clients," as they're now called -- posting questions and a specific therapist answering.  We saw how well that worked out!) But teletherapy is gaining new ground, according to Audrey Quinn at smartplanet.com, and one therapist has even partnered with 50 other therapists in a variety of fields and she will soon bring that number up to 100 to do this very thing. TalkSession was recently chosen by GE Ventures and Startup Health Academy to participate i

There's hope for those who would be violent.  Thomas Insel, the U.S. mental health chief, said yesterday that the risk of violent behavior "drops 15-fold for people who receive treatment for psychosis," compared to those who do not, according to a story at Healthwatch, THE HILL'S healthcare blog. How do we get them into treatment before they commit a crime, though?  Those with mental illness are notoriously resistant to treatment and even Adam Lanza, who massacred 20 beautiful children in Newtown last month, was reportedly angry that his mother was about to commit him, and that's why he went on his murderous rampage. No one will ever know for sure, and Insel is not saying treatment would have helped Lanza, or prevented the tragedy, but, according to the story, the risk of potential violence multiplies the longer psychosis goes untreated. The scary truth is that one in five people in this country suffer from mental illness.  Not all of it is psychosis, of co