Interface Consultation Services, PLLC

In the final months of Rebecca Riley's life, a school nurse said the little girl was so weak she was like a "floppy doll." The preschool principal had to help Rebecca off the bus because the 4-year-old was shaking so badly. And a pharmacist complained that Rebecca's mother kept coming up with excuses for why her daughter needed more and more medication. None of their concerns was enough to save Rebecca. Rebecca — who had been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity and bipolar disorder , or what used to be called manic depression — died Dec. 13 of an overdose of prescribed drugs, and her parents have been arrested on murder charges, accused of intentionally overmedicating their daughter to keep her quiet and out of their hair. But the tragic case is more than a story about one child. It raises troubling, larger questions about the state of child psychiatry, namely: Can children as young as Rebecca be accurately diagnosed with mental illnesses? Are rambunctious

Psychiatric Times By Emilio J. Sanz, MD, PhD and Carlos De las Cuevas, MD, PhD Although there is a tendency to avoid psychiatric medications during pregnancy, the high prevalence of psychiatric disorders in pregnant women—15% to 25%, according to recent epidemiologic studies.1-3—means that women and their physicians often face impromptu decisions regarding the initiation or continuation of drug therapy during pregnancy. The management of psychiatric problems and pharmacologic treatment in pregnancy is complex and burdened with many biologic and personal factors.Psychiatrists need to consider the impact of untreated illness on the mother and the fetus, as well as the possibility of increased risk for obstetric complications and congenital malformations associated with pharmacologic treatment. It should be stressed that untreated psychiatric illnesses pose a tremendous threat to the fetus because of maternal behavior and that discontinuing effective psychotropic treatments may exacerbate

A brief overview of Interface Consultation Services current endeavors: I. Blog Focus - We continue to post 2 times a week on ICS and Counseling Connections . Our posts include mental health research, news and thoughts we feel providers and clients will find valuable. II. Counseling Connections - Provides Licensed Professional Online and Telephone Mental Health Counseling, Coaching and Services. III. PESI Seminars by ICS: Behavioral Managed Care - How to get what your clients Need in Georgia with key information for success with managed care in April 2007. Managed Care is no fun but these skills are necessary to navigate our complicated health care system! High Risk Callers: Responding to Psychiatric Emergencies Over the Phone. New and exciting sorely needed seminar designed specifically for clinicians, call centers, triage nurses who provide efficient assessment and treatment over the phone. Psychiatric Emergencies over the phone line are DIFFICULT and extremely anxiety provoking.

Having both depression and type 2 diabetes increases the risk of death for heart patients. Each factor had been known to increase the risk of heart disease deaths by itself, but together they're even more deadly. In an analysis of more than 900 patients with established coronary artery disease, Duke University Medical Center psychologists found that those with both type 2 diabetes and symptoms of depression were more likely to die than heart patients without those conditions. The study showed that among type 2 diabetes patients, having high depression scores increased the risk of dying by 20 to 30 percent compared to patients with similar depression scores but no type 2 diabetes. "We found a trend showing that the probability of death increases as the level of depression increases in diabetic patients with coronary artery disease," said Duke researcher Anastasia Georgiades, Ph.D. She presented the results of the Duke analysis on Friday, March 9, 2007, at the annual meetin