Emotional & Mental Health Medical Answers

Withdrawal from opioid pain medications or illicit drugs is an unpleasant and frightening experience, and is particularly upsetting for family members and friends who are often called upon to help the addicted person through this crisis and who very much want him to get and stay clean, but who may

The feeling that you are not really there is a fairly common experience, and it is likely to be one of two things, although the number of potential causes of those things is quite large. Most of the time, feelings of "derealization", which the description of these experiences most suggests, or the

Cutting oneself without wanting to and despite the desire to stop and making efforts to stop is part of a disorder of harming oneself that has been recognized since ancient times and in most cultures and societies. Western medicine and psychiatry classed self-harm with suicide attempts for a long

This is a combination of a very common symptom, difficulty focusing, concentrating or being "in the moment", and a less specific and possibly less frequent one, difficulty speaking audibly and clearly at some times but not at others. The list of potential causes, as is often the case when illnesses

Breathing difficulties summarized in excellent details the major symptoms and usual presentation of panic attacks, panic disorder and agoraphobia. This is a leading cause of emergency department evaluations and referrals for cardiology assessment on the one hand and for psychiatric evaluation on

Addiction to prescription pain medications is one of the public health problems today, in part because there have been great advances in pain treatment that have made powerful pain medications available to many people who were previously incapacitated by pain. Unfortunately, most of these highly

You are not alone in trying to deal with continuing drug use during pregnancy, and it is appropriate to be concerned about both the effects of drugs on the baby and the effects that stopping the drugs and risking withdrawal might have on the pregnancy. The safest course is to get off the pain

The short answer to the question of whether someone with paranoid schizophrenia is likely to be violent or dangerous is usually "no". Schizophrenia, particularly the paranoid form, has for a long time been associated in the public mind with violence. This view has been reinforced by media reports

You probably do not have tokophobia, the unreasoning fear of delivering a baby, as it has recently been defined in the very few papers that have been written about it, but these feelings and concerns may well indicate an anxiety problem that would benefit from attention. Your boyfriend, your mom

Depression is one of the most common reasons for medical office visit, and is the most common reason for which people seek or are referred for psychological or psychiatric treatment. The iconic image of the psychiatric consultation in our culture is the patient reclining on the therapist's couch