Sometimes the health care system just does not work.     Peter Elias, MD | Physician | February 11, 2013   I had seen him one week earlier on a Friday afternoon, accompanied by his estranged wife. They were there because of concern about increased depression. He told me that he had stopped taking his lithium and paroxetine (Paxil) several months earlier because he felt they weren’t working. He also readily admitted to having returned to the habit of drinking one or two six-packs daily and more on weekends several months before the medications stopped working. As the story evolved, I learned that he had stopped going to work and…

Psychologist Marc Milhander, 54, says he's weeks away of having to close his Niles, Mich., counseling center after delays and denials in insurance payments caused by an overhaul of treatment codes. Jennifer Shephard / Jennifer Shephard for NBC News By JoNel Aleccia, Staff Writer, NBC News Published at 4:45 a.m. ET:   Marc Milhander conducted more than 100 psychotherapy sessions in the first few weeks of this year, treating patients ranging from the mildly anxious to the severely depressed and the 24-year-old with antisocial personality disorder who really wants to get his hands on a gun. But Milhander, 54, a psychologist who co-owns a busy Niles, Mich., counseling center, is…

Monday, Mar. 19, 2012 By John Cloud   The mind, in our modern conception, is an array of circuits we can manipulate with chemicals to ease, if not cure, depression, anxiety and other disorders. Drugs like Prozac have transformed how we respond to mental illness. But while this revolution has reshaped treatments, it hasn't done much to help us diagnose what's wrong to begin with. Instead of ordering lab tests, psychiatrists usually have to size up people using subjective descriptions of the healthy vs. the afflicted. Which is why the revision of a single book is roiling the world of mental health, pitting psychiatrists against one another in bitter debates.…