Interface Consultation Services, PLLC

You create your own adventures.

We cannot overemphasize the important of differential diagnosis in evaluation of physical and mental health. This article clearly describes an instances of misdiagnosis. We hope you find this informative during the mosquito season.... Lyme disease can masquerade as a host of psychiatric ills, confounding doctors and driving patients to question their very sanity. By: Pamela Weintraub 1993, I spread a map across the living room of our apartment in Forest Hills, Queens, and marked a bull's-eye at Grand Central Station, where trains come in from the 'burbs. I drew a 50-mile radius around the mark, and spent the next three months searching, with my husband, Mark, for a house. We sought top-rated schools for our two boys, proximity to a train en route to Manhattan, and an ample yard. As chance would have it, we ended our hunt at the most devastatingly beautiful spot, a winding country road abutting a spruce forest in the tony suburban hamlet of Chappaqua, in Westchester County, New...

This work by the author of the article below provide useful tools for quick and fairly accurate examination of symptoms which can lend a provisional psychiatric diagnosis. That being said, interviewing techniques can be used to increase the accuracy of self-report but collateral information from physiological evidence and other sources (other clinicians, family, etc) greatly improves the accuracy of these evaluations. Please link to the site for the full article. The Psychiatric Review of Symptoms: A Screening Tool for Family Physicians DANIEL J. CARLAT, M.D., Anna Jacques Hospital, Newburyport, Massachusetts The psychiatric review of symptoms is a useful screening tool for identifying patients who have psychiatric disorders. The approach begins with a mnemonic encompassing the major psychiatric disorders: depression, personality disorders, substance abuse disorders, anxiety disorders, somatization disorder, eating disorders, cognitive disorders and psychotic disorders. For each categ...

The National Instititute of Mental Health has completed en evaluation of research and the effectiveness for mental disorders for children. Please see NIMH site and below.. Reviews of the current research on psychosocial and behavioral therapies, or psychotherapies, for children and adolescents found a number of "well established" and "probably efficacious" treatments for many mental disorders. For example, six were "probably efficacious" for anxiety disorders, and two were "well established" for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), according to scientists funded by NIMH and the National Institute on Drug Abuse, divisions of the National Institutes of Health. The results were published in a special issue of the Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, and cover the current state of research psychotherapies for children and adolescents with mental disorders. NIMH grantees Wendy Silverman, Ph.D., of Florida International Uni...

(AP) -- A rare genetic variation dramatically raises the risk of developing autism, a large study showed, opening new research targets for better understanding the disorder and for treating it. Research into the causes of autism has focused on genetic causes because so many families have multiple children with the disorder. Thus far, only about 10 percent of autism cases have a known genetic cause. Boston, Massachusetts-area researchers estimate the gene glitch they've identified accounts for an additional 1 percent of cases. They found that in people with autism, a segment of a chromosome that has genes linked to brain development and various developmental disorders was either missing or duplicated far more often. The defect was inherited in some cases, but more often the result of a random genetic accident. The results from the Autism Consortium study, released online Wednesday by the New England Journal of Medicine, confirm those of smaller studies by U.S. and Canadian research ...

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. -Martin Luther King, Jr.

A brief overview of Interface Consultation Services ( ICS ) current endeavors: I. PESI Seminars by ICS : 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. General Medical Clinics are seeing more psychiatric patients. Learn the skills you didn't learn in school to assist these patients. II. Telemental Health Triage - We continue our day-to-day service commitment to Riverwood Center to provide professional triage services so their consumers are assured efficient and timely access to mental health services, appropriate level of care assignments and expert telephone crisis triage. III. Utilization Management - We continue to provide acute care authorization for Riverwood Center, a community mental heal...