PsyDactic

Functional Neurological Disorder was previously called Conversion Disorder or psychogenic neurological symptoms and is a condition in which a patient develops any number of neurological symptoms (such as loss of ability to move or seizure like episodes or inability to feel parts of their body or phantom pain) that cannot be explained by a clear lesion in the nervous system.  It was called conversion disorder because it was previous...

Dr. O'Leary introduces PsyDactic - Child and Adolescent Board Study edition by sharing the first of two episodes on behaviorism, that field of psychology that took the radical stance of completely ignoring the fact that we have a mind.

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References and readings (when available) are posted at the end of each episode transcri...

-- Dr. O'Leary explores how an artificial intelligence tool summarizes recent data on the use of nicotinic receptor modulators for the treatment of anxiety and PTSD.  Please send any comments to feedback@psydactic.com.

Please leave feedback at https://www.psydactic.com or send any comments to feedback@psydactic.com.

References and readings (when available) are posted at the end of each episode transcript, located ...

"People are 14 times more likely to die during a hospital stay than outside of hospital for inpatient psychiatry."  In the last episode, I shared an episode of Psychiatry Boot Camp, which is a podcast created by Dr. Mark Mullen to help medical students and junior residents hone their psychiatric skills.  Mark interviews some of the most competent and amazing psychiatrists our country has to offer.  I am excited that Mark ...

In the last episode, Dr. O'Leary interviewed the creator and host of the Psychiatry Bootcamp Podcast, Dr. Mark Mullen, who is currently a psychiatry clerkship director at St. Louis University School of Medicine.  He created this podcast after discovering a dearth of resources available for medical students and junior psychiatry residents to prepare them for their transition to practice. 

He graciously allowed PsyDactic to inclu...

Dr. O'Leary is excited to introduce you to  Psychiatry Boot Camp (PBC), a podcast created by Dr. Mark Mullen during his psychiatry residency to help prepare medical students for psychiatry residency. It covers fundamental topics in psychiatry and inspires young psychiatrists to think critically about their approach to the field. The curriculum is based on published literature on psychiatry crash courses and boot camps, and fea...

--In today's episode, Dr. O'Leary explores agonists, inverse agonists, partial agonists, and antagonists. These terms describe how molecules bind to receptors and either increase, decrease, or prevent changes in receptor signaling. Agonists increase receptor activity, with full agonists like dopamine and serotonin raising activity to its maximum. Partial agonists can increase activity in the absence of full agonists but d...

--Dr. O'Leary discusses the term Transference, and if you listen until the end, he relates it to some computational neuroscience.   Transference is a historically loaded term.  Transference is supposed to be an unconscious process, so it can not really be observed, only inferred, so this means that both the definition of transference and any instance of it in psychotherapy is dependent upon the therapist’s model and their part...

  -- More recently I have faced the diagnostic conundrum of catatonia in autism, and that is what I want to explore in more excruciating detail today.  There is surprisingly little literature on the subject, and that is concerning because being able to identify and treat catatonia can be life-saving, not to mention life-altering for patients and their caretakers.  Misidentifying catatonia as mere aggression or highly limited intere...

  --  Dr. O’Leary interviews forensic psychiatrist and author Dr. Michael Schirripa about his career as a forensic psychiatrist, the release of his first thriller, Mindhunt, and his podcast Mindhunting.  Dr. Shirripa explores how his love of literature influenced his decision to pursue forensic psychiatry and ultimately resulted in his creation of an international thriller with an ambitious forensic psychiatrist as the main charact...

- - In the world of psychotropic medication, the question is not just whether it works or not, but whether it works better than a placebo and whether the effect size is clinically significant and the benefits outweigh the risks.  In the case of MDMA (aka molly or ecstasy), the effect size for improving post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms reported by researchers has been very large.  Often it is found to be two to three times hi...

The Narrative Fallacy describes our tendency to find meaning, connections, and causal relationships where they do not necessarily exist.  In this episode, Dr. O'Leary had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Alexey Tolchinsky.

He recently published a paper called “Narrative fallacy and other limitations of psychodynamic case formulation.”  Dr. Tolchenski did not invent the idea of the Narrative Fallacy, but he is wor...

Dr. O'Leary discusses a variety of concerns that all clinicians should have in mind when using psychometrics.  In the end, he hopes you come away  with some level of agreement with the statement: “Our primary concern should not be with the quantity of data, but with the quality of the data.”  Statistics are conceptual machines that will produce results no matter what you feed them.  These results can be truly helpful and infor...

In this episode, Dr. O'Leary discusses a word that he has struggled to understand since medical school.  The word is aphasia.  The root “phasia” comes from the Greek phanai which means “to speak.”  When aphasia is used medically, it refers to an inability to speak, although not always.  More generally it is often used to mean a failure to understand or produce language, but it gets complicated.  Dr. O'Leary reviews the br...

I did not until recently even consider the cerebellum when thinking about psychiatric conditions, but the more I read, the more I wonder why the cerebellum is not considered a potential important player in nearly every psychiatric disorder.  Although it can be said that all brain regions primarily function to make predictions, the cerebellum is especially active at refining impromptu predictions through short periods of time as sen...

The thalami are bilaterally symmetrical structures in the subcortical part of the brain that are cradled by the basal ganglia.  They are major hubs of pretty much everything your brain does and all of the sensory information coming into the brain with the exception of smell.

More primitive models of the brain visualized it as a bunch of relatively isolated modules, each specialized to perform a single task when queried and...

In this episode, I discuss a medication that patients who saw a psychiatrist or their primary care provider between about 1997 and 2015 were very likely to find themselves prescribed.  More recently, it has been taken down a notch or two on prescribers lists of preferred meds.  This medication is quetiapine, marketed as Seroquel by AstraZeneca in the US.  Whether you were diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, ...

This episode continues an intermittent series called “In a Word.”  Past episodes have explored words like Akathisia, Dissociation, Perseveration, and even the difference between Impulsive and Compulsive.  This episode explores Confabulation, including some of the brain circuits involved, and what might differentiate confabulation from other kinds of false or implanted memories or delusions.

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In 2012 the Supreme Court heard two related cases involving adolescents convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole because of mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines in their states.  One of the boys, Evan Miller along with an accomplice, had beat a man unconscious with a baseball bat after a fight that ensued when the man awoke to find Miller robbing him.  Miller and his friend then decided to set fire to t...