Saturday, March 12, 2005

Fewer Panic Attacks With Talk Therapy WebMD story - "People get fewer panic attackspanic attacks when they get talk therapy as well as drug treatment. The therapy -- a simplified version of a psychotherapy known as cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT -- took only six, hour-long sessions over 12 weeks. Since many panic-attack patients do not ever see a clinical psychologist or psychiatrist, the treatment was designed to be given in doctors' offices by nurses trained in the technique. University of Washington researcher Peter P. Roy-Byrne, MD, and colleagues report the findings in the March issue of Archives of General Psychiatry."  
  

Poverty May Raise Mental Illness Risk Health Day News story at Yahoo - "The stresses of poverty may increase a person's risk for mental illness, according to a new U.S. study. 'The poorer one's socioeconomic conditions are, the higher one's risk is for mental disability and psychiatric hospitalization,' researcher Christopher G. Hudson of Salem State College, in Massachusetts, said in a prepared statement. He and his colleagues analyzed data on 34,000 patients with a history of two or more psychiatric hospitalizations in Massachusetts from 1994 to 2000. Reporting in the current issue of the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, they found a correlation between risk of mental illness and unemployment, poverty and inability to afford housing."