Therapy

Wider use of antidepressants and other prescription medications has reduced the role of psychotherapy, once the defining characteristic of psychiatric care, according to an analysis published today. The percentage of patients who received psychotherapy fell to 28.9% in 2004-05 from 44.4% in 1996-97, the report in Archives of General Psychiatry said.

Psychological counseling, muscle relaxation and other strategies for reducing stress in breast cancer patients can cut their risk of death from the disease by more than half, according to a study published online Monday in the journal Cancer. The study also found that psychological interventions reduced the risk that tumors would come back by 45%. Even when tumors returned, patients who received the counseling had six more cancer-free months compared with those who did not.

2006 was destined to be the year Warren Ratcliffe lost his desperate race to survive AIDS, and the year Mark McClelland appeared, finally, poised to win his. The two Bay Area men were among an estimated 40,000 Americans whose illness could not be controlled by modern HIV drugs because they'd developed a bedeviling resistance to them.

"GREY'S Anatomy" star Isaiah Washington checked into a residential treatment center Wednesday morning for psychological counseling stemming from his repeated uses of homophobic slurs, most recently at the Golden Globes award ceremony. "I regard this as a necessary step toward understanding why I did what I did and making sure it never happens again," Washington said in a statement released by his publicist.

BEFORE her first trip to the Dead Sea five years ago, 40-year-old Rhonda Dupras didn't even own a pair of shorts. Suffering from severe psoriasis over her entire body, Dupras normally cloaked herself in long sleeves and long pants, hiding her red, flaky, scaly skin from curious stares and prying questions.

Suntanned skin may be in vogue today, but for thousands of years it was a thing to be avoided. From ancient Greece right up to about 1900, the wealthy in many northern countries went to great lengths to keep their complexions fair -- tanned skin being a sign of poverty. Tans started to become fashionable when doctors began advocating sunlight therapy around the turn of the last century, but the medical trend was fairly short-lived.

Alan Chambers directs Exodus International, widely described as the nation's largest ex-gay ministry. But when he addresses the group's Freedom Conference at Concordia University in Irvine this month, Chambers won't celebrate successful "ex-gays." Truth is, he's not sure he's ever met one. With years of therapy, Chambers says, he has mostly conquered his own attraction to men; he's a husband and a father, and he identifies as straight.

The toddlers spot him the instant he steps out of his office. They swarm him like bees, shouting his name: "Archie! Archie! Archie!" He drops to the ground, eye-level with 3-year-olds. They lean into him, hug him, climb on him. At Casa Pacifica, a Ventura County oasis for abused, neglected and emotionally disturbed children, patience and calm aren't just virtues; they're job requirements.

"A small pet animal is often an excellent companion for the sick," wrote Florence Nightingale in 1859, but it was not until a century later that scientists began documenting that claim. Clinical psychologist Boris Levinson of New York's Yeshiva University wrote about pet-oriented child psychotherapy in the 1950s after finding that disturbed and withdrawn children opened up to him when his dog, Jingles, was in the room.

Dressed in a blue power suit, Elyn Saks addressed a gathering of psychologists here with the quiet demeanor of an intellectual sure of her academic resume: college valedictorian, Oxford scholar, Yale law student, USC legal professor. But her words were not serene. They evoked nightmares. Over 30 years, as she forged her career, she wrestled with uncouth visions, violent commands and suicidal impulses, Saks explained to her listeners.