Psychiatric disorder is now recognised as Psychiatric disorder is now recognised as one of the greatest causes of human one of the greatest causes of human suffering. The burden to society of various suffering. The burden to society of various diseases has been quantified recently using diseases has been quantified recently using disability-adjusted life years (DALYs), a disability-adjusted lif...

INTRODUCTION It has been demonstrated that there are differences in the efficacy and acceptability of commonly prescribed antidepressants (Cipriani et al. 2009). This meta-analysis showed that escitalopram, sertraline, venlafaxine and mirtazapine were the most effective in the acute treatment of unipolar depression in adults. In this audit, these most effective antidepressants will be referred ...

Os transtornos depressivos são um problema de saúde pública devido não só a alta prevalência, bem como o impacto no contexto biopsicossocial. São múltiplas as estratégias terapêuticas utilizadas para tratamento da depressão unipolar, incluindo combinações antidepressivos com outros agentes psicotrópicos e psicoterapêutico. Em casos responsividade, ou seja, refratária ao tratamento, há possibili...

T h e unitary concept of manic-depressive psychoses as originally proposed by Kraeplin (1921) has been questioned by recent investigators such as Leonhard (1965) and Perris (1966), who have presented clinical and genetic evidence to suggest that it is a heterogenous group consisting of two distinct types—(a) the unipolar which is characterised by recurrent episodes of depression only, and (b) t...

Development of 'rebound' mania in a patient with recurrent manic psychosis (Cordess 1982), triggering of psychotic illness (Klein et al 1981) and relapse of manic depressive psychosis (Shashidharan et al 1983 & Mander 1986) have been described following withdrawal from long term treatment with lithium. Change of polarity has been reported following withdrawal of tricyclic antidepressant in pati...

This problem was first discussed by Stokes over 150 years ago [1, 2, 3, 4], who noted that three-dimensional sound waves from a bounded source cannot be unipolar. While his argument applies to electromagnetic waves as well, this is little recognized in the literature. One-dimensional electromagnetic (and sound) waves can be unipolar. A plane wave can have any pulseform, but, strictly speaking, ...