10/22/19. Dr. Dimitriu was published in Psychology on the topic of bipolar vs borderline personality disorder.

Diagnosing psychiatric illness isn’t easy. There’s usually no lab test, physical indication, or quantitative measurement that can distinguish one illness from another and often no magic bullet that can ensure effective treatment. Clinicians are dependent on a description of symptoms and patterns over time to make a diagnosis and these often appear similar even when the underlying illness is very different.

One example of this difficulty is in the incidence of borderline personality disorder being misdiagnosed as bipolar disorder. Both are characterized by impulsive behavior, mood swings, and suicidal thinking but have different causes and different treatments. Only an experienced medical professional can make the right diagnosis and determine appropriate treatment, but patients and their families can help by paying attention to their own thoughts and feelings and describing them accurately.

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9/24/19. Dr. Dimitriu was published in Psychology on the topic of Sleep and Memory: How They Work Together.

For many people, just getting through the day is a monumental struggle. Those suffering from anxiety, depression, and ADHD must fight to control their impulses simply to function and stay on task through a day of work or school when they’d rather be home in bed or playing video games. Having held it together all day, they then find those impulses even harder to control at the end of the day. Twenty years ago, a series of experiments demonstrated that impulse control is a finite resource that can be depleted – that suppressing impulses and feelings for some length of time can eventually make those impulses and feelings harder to resist. This phenomenon, known as “ego fatigue” or “ego depletion,” is recognized as a problem for those struggling with anxiety, depression, and ADHD as well as for people battling substance abuse and binge eating. The effect is similar to the depletion of physical and cognitive energy at the end of a long, busy day when all you want to do is relax and do nothing. Saying “no” to your urges all day makes it harder to control those urges in the evening when your store of control has been used up.

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Dr. Dimitriu was published in Psychology Today on the topic of Sleep and Memory: How They Work Together.

Medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas once wrote that “sorrow can be alleviated by good sleep.” Now, scientists are learning he was not far from the truth. 

A study published in July 2019 in the journal Current Biology indicates a poor night’s sleep—specifically, restless rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep—negatively impacts brain function, including the work of amygdalae. These are almond-sized clusters of nuclei located deep within the brain’s temporal lobes and responsible for the consolidation of memories for long-term learning, as well as the processing and storage of memories associated with events that elicit strong emotions like sorrow, embarrassment, fear, and anxiety.  Upon awakening, study volunteers who experienced disrupted REM sleep remained reactive to emotional events from the previous day while well-rested individuals labeled prior-day events as being of lesser emotional significance than they originally thought, according to the researchers.

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By Elizabeth Yuko, August 15, 2019

In fact, it’s that “realness” of dreams that causes us to continue to experience feelings from the dream—whether that’s joy, sadness, fear or anxiety—upon waking. “There is some theory that we process emotions and feelings in dreams, and in some cases if the emotions are too strong, we wake up, and never get to ‘process’ these thoughts,” Dimitriu explains. “This is believed to be the case with PTSD, and why people with PTSD continue to suffer and wake with disturbing nightmares by night, and flashbacks by day.”

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by Emma Stessman, August 2019

The problem is, weighted blankets are often made with plastic pellets or glass beads, and all that extra weight can make things hot. “The body’s ability to cool off naturally at night allows us to enter deeper, more refreshing sleep,” says Alex Dimitriu, MD, a psychiatrist and founder of Menlo Park Psychiatry & Sleep Medicine. A heavy blanket can easily interrupt that, he says. To counter those effects, you should maintain a cool room temperature and choose a blanket with a breathable material. Companies like Gravity and Luxome offer “cooling” blankets, made with moisture-wicking and thermal-controlled materials to help things stay at a sleep-worthy temp.

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July 23, 2019, by Risa Kerslake

“Sleep is the tip of the iceberg for our mind’s state,” Dimitriu explains. “People find it much easier to notice sleep is off because it is objective, thus it truly opens the door to investigating if something else is wrong.”

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By Tracey Anne Duncan, 7/18/19

“REM sleep is considered a time when the brain can process emotional memories, and ‘pack them away,” says Alex Dimitriu, a psychiatrist and sleep specialist at Menlo Park Psychiatry and Sleep Medicine in the San Francisco Bay Area. “When everything is working well, we experience unpleasant — and pleasant — situations, and our brains ‘rehearse’ and process these memories through the night. Like the process of therapy, which REM sleep has been compared to, this helps consolidate and safely store these experiences.”

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