Mark Horowitz

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Mark Horowitz is a training psychiatrist, now working as a Clinical Research Fellow at UCL and North East London NHS Foundation Trust. He is an Associate Editor of the journal Therapeutic Advances in Psychopharmacology and has edited a collection of papers in the journal on Discontinuing Psychotropic Medication. He has a PhD in psychopharmacology and the neurobiology of depression from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London. He has an interest in rational psychopharmacology and safe deprescribing of psychiatric medications, which has been the focus of his recent work published in The Lancet Psychiatry, JAMA Psychiatry, the British Journal of Psychiatry and Schizophrenia Bulletin, as well as a forthcoming textbook on the subject.

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The benefits and harms of antidepressants for youth depression and anxiety #ActiveIngredientsMH

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Mark Horowitz and Joanna Moncrieff consider a new #ActiveIngredientsMH review published today in The Lancet Psychiatry, which looks at the knowns and unknowns of antidepressant treatment in young people with depression and anxiety: efficacy, predictors, and mechanisms of action.

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Expertise from outside the Academy: tapering off antidepressants

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Mark Horowitz considers a recent article written by Adele Framer, Founder of SurvivingAntidepressants.org, which describes how best to help people who are tapering off antidepressants.

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Do happy people live longer?

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Mark Horowitz looks at the prospective UK Million Women Study and wonders if happiness itself has a directly impact on mortality.

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A fish a day keeps depression away?

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Mark Horowitz fires up the barbecue and slices some lemons as he summarises a recent meta-analysis which concludes that higher fish consumption was found to be associated with a reduced risk of depression.

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What is the sociodemographic recipe for happiness?

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Mark Horowitz summarises a recent study that investigates the impact that socio-economic gradients have on mental well-being. He finds to his surprise that the relationship between socio-economic characteristics and low mental well-being is not the inverse of the relationship with high mental well-being.

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Social determinants of mental health: how our societies are making us mentally unwell and what we can do about it

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Mark Horowitz summarises the new WHO and UCL Institute of Health Equity (Michael Marmot) report and research paper on social determinants of mental health. He concludes that it’s time to focus on the root causes of mental distress, namely poverty, unemployment, poor education and social isolation.

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Lifestyle changes for cognition and dementia: better than a new drug?

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Should all molecular research institutes looking at neurodegenerative diseases be replaced by parks, playgrounds and cycle paths? Mark Horowitz highlights a recent systematic review of modifiable risk factors associated with cognition and dementia, which suggests that from a public health perspective, there may be some sense in this idea.

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Could measuring cortisol levels become a biological test for risk of depression in adolescent males?

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Is it possible to work out which of two adolescents sitting before you complaining of unhappiness, which one will go home and sleep it off and which will go on to develop an episode of major depression? Has the biological revolution in psychiatry finally come to fruition with a useful biomarker for making treatment decisions? [read the full story…]

Be Mindful of the Gap: What we know about ‘third wave’ cognitive behavioural therapies compared to other psychological therapies

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Breathe. Hold in your mind your view of what constitutes the most effective psychological therapy for acute depression. Try not to identify with your favourite therapy but simply observe it and let it be. Wish it well. And breathe again. This was not the approach of the Cochrane Depression, Anxiety and Neurosis Group when it [read the full story…]