By YouAreUNLTD, March 6, 2020

According to psychiatrist Dr. Alex Dimitriu, founder of the Menlo Park Psychiatry and Sleep Medicine Center in Menlo Park, CA, sadness is generally short-lived and dissipates over time as we adjust to a new situation. “We often casually refer to this situational sadness as depression,” he says, “but it is important to distinguish it from clinical depression, a much more severe and long-lasting condition that has serious implications for long-term mental and physical health and must be diagnosed and treated by a medical professional.”

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By Julia Rachel Malacoff, March 04, 2020

Another potential (and ironic) side effect of some antihistamine-containing OTC sleep aids is less-than-great sleep. “There is some concern that diphenhydramine may also negatively impact sleep by reducing REM sleep (or dream sleep),” says Dr. Dimitriu. Lack of REM sleep can affect your memory, mood, cognitive performance, and even cell regeneration, so this can be pretty problematic.

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February 19, 2020 Dr. Dimitriu was published in Psychology Today on the topic of ADHD in adults.

ADHD isn’t just for kids. While attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder is now well recognized and commonly diagnosed in children, less attention has been focused on the fact that about half of these children carry some of the symptoms of ADHD into adulthood. What’s more, there are many adults with ADHD who have never been diagnosed or treated. Many grew up in a time when kids who exhibited the hyperactivity, inattention, and impulsiveness that characterize ADHD were labeled troublemakers, dreamers, lazy, or just “bad.”

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By Harry Guinness, Jan. 16, 2020

Dr. Alex Dimitriu, founder of the Menlo Park Psychiatry and Sleep Medicine clinic, explained it like this: “Long days leave us tired and exhausted, but the reality is, our days would be less hard, and less exhausting, if we weren’t so tired through them. The trouble with being a night owl is that your sleep gets clipped in the morning hours, where most of the precious REM or dream sleep occurs. Instead of sleeping seven or eight hours per night, most night owls get forced to sleep five or six — with a hard start time in the morning.” Dr. Dimitriu can’t stress enough just how important REM sleep is. It’s “the key to our emotional and creative energy” and comparable to “self-therapy,” he said, adding that it “balances us out in more ways than I can describe” and that without enough of it, our memory and moods take a hit.

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by George Citroner on January 8, 2020

“I think it’s important to recognize what alcohol is. Alcohol is effectively, in many ways an anesthetic, alcohol makes you feel less, not feel more,” Alex Dimitriu, of Menlo Park Psychiatry and Sleep Medicine, told Healthline. “The question then becomes, ‘What is it that we’re trying to anesthetize?’ Because I think that these rising rates of alcohol-related deaths and binge drinking are really evidence of a society that perhaps is trying to mask, hide, or run from something,” he said.

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1/6/2020. Dr. Dimitriu was published in Psychology on the topic of Identifying bipolar disorder’s “softer side”.

It’s true. Bipolar disorder has a “softer side,” and that’s what makes the condition’s diagnosis all the more challenging in people who have a wide array of what might be considered “finer symptoms.” 

Classic bipolar disorder is characterized by dramatic, extreme mood swings—from high “highs” (mania and hypomania, “I can do anything”) to low “lows” (depression, suicidal thoughts, anxiety, paranoia). But what about people with symptoms considered more “common,” like periods of anxiousness, sense of uneasiness, irritability, boredom, poor decision-making, and feelings of meaninglessness intermingled with moments of energy and intensity, euphoria, a spurt of ideas, focus, brilliance, vision, and achievement? These are often missed in psychiatric examinations because they are not viewed as a connected whole. They fall beneath what might be called the “threshold of diagnosis,” failing to fit neatly within standard clinical tools like the Bipolar Spectrum Diagnostic Scale or the Mood Disorder Questionnaire.

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By Julia Ries, 12/10/2019

On top of that, easy access to the IVs reduces the consequences of heavy drinking. If we’re not paying for our alcohol-infused mistakes with a brutal hangover, how are we ever going to learn? “While likely an effective way to rehydrate, the process of getting too drunk, hungover, to the point of requiring nearly medical intervention, sounds a bit too intense to be healthy or sustainable,” said Alex Dimitriu, a double board-certified psychiatrist and sleep medicine physician.

Click HERE for the full article.