Treatment-Resistant Depression

Mental illness and medical assistance in dying

Medical Assistance in Dying for Mental Illness

Should people with mental illness have access to medical assistance in dying? In Canada, that’s going to happen in the near future, but exactly what it will look like hasn’t been decided yet. This is something I support, but a lot of people don’t, so I thought I’d write about it. A bit of background …

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Why do psych medications sometimes stop working? - image of a pill bottle

Why Do Psych Medications Stop Working Sometimes?

A fellow blogger asked this question recently, and it’s taken me a while to pull this post together because there just isn’t a simple answer as to why psych medications stop working out of the blue sometimes. There are various possibilities, but there’s also a hefty dose of science just doesn’t know yet. How the …

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Non-Acceptance, Suffering, and Mental Illness

A fellow blogger wrote a while back about creating your peace, and it got me thinkng about the relationship between non-acceptance and suffering in the context of mental illness. Mental illness isn’t fun, that much is clear. How we relate to illness, wellness, and recovery can evolve over time depending on the individual illness, how …

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brain glowing with electrical charge

This One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: ECT in Real Life

Ask anyone of a certain age what comes to mind first when they hear the term electroconvulsive therapy (aka ECT, aka electroshock therapy, aka shock therapy), and chances are they will mention the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest starring Jack Nicholson. The reality is very different.

Options for Managing Treatment-Resistant Depression

Wouldn’t it be nice if the treatment of depression was simple? Unfortunately, there’s nothing simple about depression treatment in the real world. Treatment-resistant depression (TRD) refers to depression that hasn’t responded to trials of adequate duration and dosage of at least two antidepressants. When determining whether the illness is treatment-resistant, it’s important to consider whether …

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Ketamine for treatment-resistant depression

Ketamine for Treatment-Resistant Depression

Ketamine is a relatively new option for managing treatment-resistant depression that has a different mechanism of action from other antidepressant medications. Ketamine itself isn’t new, though; it’s a dissociative anaesthetic that’s also known by its club drug name Special K. Over the last 10-15 years, multiple research trials have shown that it has an antidepressant …

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