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Riggs in The News

There is growing evidence that psychotherapy is an effective treatment for a range of mental health disorders--and some studies have suggested psychotherapy is associated with brain change in those who respond. The addition of psychotherapy to a medication regimen can improve outcomes, it can be an essential treatment for patients who fail to respond adequately to biological treatments or who have multiple mental disorders. Below are recent press articles and publications related to psychodynamic psychotherapy.


APsaA: Patient's Suicide Less Stressful in Deed than in Thought

Article on medpagetoday.com featuring Dr. Jane Tillman

Analysts have greater distress when they imagine a patient committing suicide than they do when patients actually take their own lives, researchers say.
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APsaA: Top Psychoanalytic Journals Lack Rigorous Research

Article on medpagetoday.com featuring Dr. Jane Tillman

The top three psychoanalytic journals are short on original research on psychoanalysis, researchers said.
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Sweet Benefactor James

James Taylor speaks about his treatment at Riggs

8.20.09 Boston Globe

Treatment Resistance: Introduction: Underlying Causes and Implications

Article in Psychiatric Times

The articles in this Special Report reflect the growing recognition of the importance of the problem of treatment-resistant psychiatric disorders. Mintz and Belnap1 recently reported that Medline citations on treatment-resistant psychiatric disorders increased 800% over the previous 20 years, while the overall number of citations increased 25%. Despite significant advances in neurobiology and psychopharmacology, we have become increasingly aware of the limitations of treatment for most psychiatric illnesses and that a significant number of psychiatric patients will not experience full recovery.

Copyright 2009, Psychiatric Times, CMPMedica, All rights reserved.
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Psychodynamic Psychopharmacology: Addressing the Underlying Causes of Treatment Resistance

Article in Psychiatric Times

During the past 2 decades, psychiatry has benefited from an increasingly evidence-based perspective and a proliferation of safer, more tolerable, and perhaps more effective treatments. Despite these advances, however, treatment outcomes are not substantially better than they were a quarter of a century ago.1 Treatment resistance remains a serious problem across psychiatric diagnoses.2 One likely reason that outcomes have not improved substantially is that, as the pendulum has swung from a psychodynamic framework to a biological one, the impact of meaning (ie, the role of psychosocial factors in treatment-refractory illness) has been relatively neglected, and psychiatrists have lost some potent tools for working with the most troubled patients.

Copyright 2009, Psychiatric Times, CMPMedica, All rights reserved.
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