Psychiatry blog
Clinical teaching and practical ideas for your next study session.
OCD Family Accommodation: How to Reduce Reassurance Without Losing Support
When a partner is drawn into repeated checking, simply saying “stop reassuring” can turn treatment into a standoff. Learn to reduce ritual participation collaboratively while preserving emotional support and ordinary safety.
Interoceptive Exposure for Panic: Match Each Drill to the Fear
For an interoceptive-exposure SAQ, go beyond naming drills: match each bodily cue to the fear it tests, and avoid promising that habituation proves safety.
Poorly Controlled Diabetes: When Is Depression Due to It?
A high A1C does not settle whether a depressive syndrome is caused by diabetes. Learn how to distinguish a direct medical cause from co-occurring major depression and diabetes distress.
When a Psychotic Teen Refuses Psychiatric Admission
A psychotic adolescent’s refusal raises three separate questions: whether inpatient care is needed, who may authorize admission, and what process permits admission over objection.
FND Management SAQs: Match Each Treatment to a Target
A strong FND management answer matches rehabilitation and psychological support to the patient’s symptoms and functional needs—without assuming a cause, a comorbidity, or a one-size-fits-all treatment.
Delirium and Refusal of Surgery: Who Can Authorize Treatment?
When delirium prevents a patient from weighing a time-critical operation, a capacity finding is not consent. Learn how best-interests reasoning, prior wishes, legal proxies, urgency, and restraint shape the next step in England and Wales.
Psychosis After Seizures: Lucid Interval or Nonconvulsive Status?
After a seizure cluster, psychosis may emerge after a lucid interval—but ongoing nonconvulsive seizures can look psychiatric too. Learn how chronology, serial attention checks, and EEG should shape urgent care and disposition.
Antidepressant Relapse in Pregnancy: What 68% vs 26% Means
The classic pregnancy-relapse MCQ contrasts 68% after antidepressant discontinuation with 26% during continuation. Read these as cohort results—not a personal forecast or a universal treatment rule.
Anti-NMDA Receptor Encephalitis: Receptor Loss, Not Just Blockade
Anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis is driven chiefly by antibody-mediated receptor cross-linking and internalization—not simply a plugged ion channel. Learn how that mechanism should inform psychiatric assessment, evolving symptoms, and antibody-test interpretation.
When Gambling Predates a Dopamine Agonist: Assessing Worsening
When gambling starts before a dopamine agonist but worsens after it is added, distinguish the onset of the behavior from its escalation. That timeline can sharpen the differential without delaying steps to reduce financial and safety harms.
Thiamine and Dextrose: How to Answer the Psychiatry SAQ Safely
This SAQ tests more than recall of thiamine. Learn to explain Wernicke risk and state what to do if hypoglycemia is confirmed—without turning a possible risk into a reason to delay urgent treatment.
PTSD vs Adjustment Disorder: Persistence Is Not the Divider
Intrusive memories and a sense that danger continues do not by themselves separate PTSD from adjustment disorder. Learn how trauma exposure, symptom pattern, timing, and impairment guide the distinction.