The BBC’s Radio 4 Saturday morning reported on NHS plans for a pilot project in Staffordshire which would allow patients engaging in self-harm to continue to do so under medical supervision. With the radio interviewers seemingly intent on ferreting out whatever controversy they could discover, it seemed to me that important points were missed about the role of self-harming as a coping mechanism.

In the largest ‘real world’ trial ever conducted, a $35 million US government study has concluded that antidepressants cure (or fail to cure) the symptoms of major depression in half of all sufferers, even when individuals are receiving the best possible care. The drugs used in the study, including Celexa, Wellbutrin, Zoloft and Effexor, work in very different ways yet had roughly equal effectiveness when it came to treating depression.

Following elderly individuals with depression for periods of up to two years, a University of Pittsburgh trial found that individuals were less likely to have recurrent depression if they received two years of maintenance therapy with the anti-depressant paroxetine. So-called ‘maintenance psychotherapy’ offered once a month for 45 minutes did not prevent recurrent depression.

One in three teens will experience an abusive relationship, but many cases go unreported. And abusive relationships may not always be recognized by teens for what they are, some experts say.

Following successful clinical trials at the University of Bonn on transcranial magnetic stimulation as a treatment for depression, Yale University researchers are now recruiting schizophrenic patients nationally for a clinical trial involving the use of TMS as a treatment for auditory hallucinations.

No, that’s not to say that CBT will put you to sleep! Rather, an article carried on the APA’s PsycPort highlights studies indicating that cognitive behavioural therapy can improve sleep about as well as drugs can. According to the article, not only can talk therapy such as CBT help with sleeping problems, but its effects continue for many months — unlike the effects of drugs, where effectiveness is not known to continue after discontinuing the medication.

The US Food and Drug Administration has indicated it will approve a patch for treating attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in children, provided that the manufacturers agree to certain changes in how the ADHD patch will be labelled and agree to monitor the product once it is on the market.