Psychiatry

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Muses at 2: Reflections by Dami Ajayi

When the editorial board of BJPsych International acceded to the launch of a web-based monthly arts blog, I volunteered as the commissioning editor. I did this partly because I already straddled the worlds of psychiatry and the creative arts. But also because it was an opportunity to be a part of something new.

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Humility

The Royal College of Psychiatrists’ values and behaviours, Courage, Innovation, Respect, Collaboration, Learning and Excellence combine into the CIRCLE acronym. In the list under Excellence, a link takes you to core values for psychiatrists. One of those is humility.

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Remarks on amelioration

The March edition of Muses – the arts blog from BJPsych International – features Nigerian poet Pamilerin Jacob who writes about being diagnosed with mental illness, his recourse to poetry, poetics and poetic language for therapy, meaning and vocation. He also pays a moving tribute to a friend who was instrumental to his survival.

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From a small seed to a giant Iroko tree: A postgraduate training programme in Child and Adolescent Mental Health in Africa

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has the youngest population of any region in the world with 70% under the age of 30 years. This youthful demographic profile can be both a blessing and a challenge. While the youth have the potential to drive economic development, meeting their educational, social, and health needs can over-stretch already limited human and material resources.

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We Were In The Pits, But At Least There Was Company

In March 2017, a medical doctor ordered his driver to stop on the Third Mainland Bridge, came down from his car and jumped into the Lagos Lagoon. Traditional media platforms and social media buzzed with this tragic news. It was not the usual fare: that cocktail of pernicious poverty, drug use, and wanton criminality; this was a gentleman. It unveiled a severe concern about that taboo subject, mental health. 

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Uniting in Resilience: How Collective Belief Heals War’s Hidden Wounds

War doesn't merely result in physical devastation. The mental and emotional aftermath, particularly from modern warfare that targets civilians, is profound. Civilians suffer alongside combatants, facing deaths, injuries, chronic disability, multiple displacements with uprooting of whole communities, loss of homes, destruction of essential services, infrastructure and environment. These traumatic experiences lead to a wide range of mental health issues, from depression, anxiety, PTSD, and substance abuse to family and collective trauma impeding personal and community recovery.

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Computational neuroscience and clinical perspective: Approaching negative symptomatology

We are honoured that our paper “Longitudinal trajectories in negative symptoms and changes in brain cortical thickness: 10-year follow-up” has been chosen as RCPsych Article of the Month. During recent years, our team has been part of the “Programa de Atención a Fases Iniciales de Psicosis (PAFIP)”. PAFIP is a three-year early intervention initiative designed for individuals who have experienced their first episode of psychosis (FEP). Those who willingly joined this program received comprehensive care from a team of professionals, including psychiatric nursing, psychology, psychiatry, and social work. A decade after the onset of psychotic disorders, the PAFIP team reconnected with the participants for a follow-up evaluation.

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Wairua and Psychiatry: healing partners  

From my Māori world view, wairua or spirituality is our essence. Everything else flows out from there. If we don’t get spiritual wellbeing right, other approaches will have only limited benefit. It seems to me that psychiatry offers treatments that are focused on the brain, addressing physical and psychological wellbeing. I notice that western talking therapies often don’t address spiritual values that are of critical importance to Māori and other Indigenous peoples.

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So Young, So Sad, So Listen

This is not an easy time for many children and parents. We hope our book ‘So Young, So Sad, So Listen’ can help parents recognise depression in their children, work out why this is happening and what can be done about it.

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Building confidence in working with patients with an eating disorder

For many years we have cared for people with severe eating disorders. Sometimes we’ve had to come to terms with tragic deaths, sometimes we’ve rejoiced to see patients and whole families enjoying renewed quality of life. All too often we’ve been frustrated to see that treatment might have been earlier, more effective or more equitable, if more of our professional colleagues better understood the nature of eating disorders.

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What leads to young people taking their own lives?

Worldwide suicide is most common in young people, and in many places rates of self-harm and suicide are rising, especially in girls. With this in mind, we wanted to explore the characteristics of suicide in young people, including gender differences and contacts with services that could play a part in prevention.

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Doctors in Parliament

The RCPsych Article of the Month for June is from BJPsych Bulletin and is entitled ‘The Parliamentary Scholar Scheme: a way to engage doctors in healthcare policy and politics’ by Jen Perry, Paul Lomax, Fiona Taylor, Susan Howson and Kathleen McCurdy.

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Shame and the medical identity

The RCPsych Article of the Month for February is from BJPsych Bulletin and is entitled ‘Addressing shame: what role does shame play in the formation of a modern medical professional identity?’ by Sandy Miles. 

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Q&A with Melissa Birkett, Reviewing Editor of Experimental Results, Psychology & Psychiatry Section

This is the latest of an ongoing series of interviews with people involved with our new Open Access journal, Experimental Results – a forum for short research papers from experimental disciplines across Science, Technology and Medicine, providing authors with an outlet for rapid publication of small chunks of research findings with maximum visibility.…

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Strategies for RelaTives (START) – family carers of people with dementia mood is improved by START but does it continue to make a difference years later?

The RCPsych Article of the Month for January is from The British Journal of Psychiatry (BJPsych) and is entitled ‘Clinical effectiveness of the START (STrAtegies for RelaTives) psychological intervention for family carers and the effects on the cost of care for people with dementia: 6-year follow-up of a randomised controlled trial’

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A mental health crisis in Lesbos

The RCPsych Article of the Month for December is from BJPsych International and is entitled ‘Headaches in Moria: a reflection on mental healthcare in the refugee camp population of Lesbos' by Tom Nutting.

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To Decide or Not to Decide- That is the Question

The Mental Capacity Act was always meant to be an enabling piece of legislation, providing carers, health and social care professionals, a legal umbrella to support what they have been doing for years when supporting individuals who lack capacity to make such decisions for themselves.

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Round up of #RCPsychIC

We were delighted to welcome delegates to our Cambridge University Press/RCPsych Publishing stand during Congress where they were able to explore our impressive portfolio of books and journals and meet the Journal Editors-in-Chief and Managing Editors during “Meet the Editor” sessions.

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Fish’s Clinical Psychopathology

In 2005, I received a phone call from Patricia Casey, Professor (now Emeritus) of Psychiatry at University College Dublin. Would I be interested in working on a new edition of Fish’s Clinical Psychopathology with her? I stood up at once - the gravity of the occasion clearly required this - and I answered with the most emphatic Yes that I have ever uttered (apart from my wedding vows, of course). Certainly, I would revise Fish with her. Could we start today?

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Patients in Crisis

The RCPsych Article of the Month for June is from BJPsych Bulletin and is entitled ‘Do patients get better? A review of outcomes from a crisis house and home treatment team partnership’ by Authors Mohsin Faysal Butt, David Walls, Rahul Bhattacharya.

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What makes a decision ‘shared’?

RCPsych Article of the Month for April is from The British Journal of Psychiatry (BJPsych) and is entitled ‘Involving patients with dementia in decisions to initiate treatment: effect on patient acceptance, satisfaction and medication prescription’ by Authors Jemima Dooley, Nick Bass, Gill Livingston and Rose McCabe.

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Discrediting Experiences

The RCPsych Article of the Month for March is from BJPsych Open and is entitled ‘Discrediting experiences: outcomes of eligibility assessments for claimants with psychiatric compared with non-psychiatric conditions transferring to personal independence payments in England'

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Is Psychoanalysis evidence based?

I wrote this short article to correct a widespread prejudice among mental health practitioners and the general public alike to the effect that psychoanalytic theory and therapy are not ‘evidence based’ -- in the sense that, say, CBT and psychopharmacology are considered to be.

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Where There Is No Psychiatrist

The newly published second edition of Where There is No Psychiatrist is a practical manual of mental health care for community health workers, primary care nurses, social workers and primary care doctors, particularly in low-resource settings. Authors Vikram Patel and Charlotte Hanlon discuss the importance of this manual below.

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UK Biobank gives unparalleled potential for future biomedical research in mental health

Until now, UK Biobank, a health data resource aiming to help scientists discover why some people develop particular diseases and others do not, had limited mental health data to work with. Following 157,366 responses to an online mental health questionnaire (MHQ) developed by researchers from King’s College London, alongside collaborators from across the UK, it now has unparalleled potential for further biomedical research in mental health, dramatically expanding potential research into mental disorders. The findings have been published in BJPsych Open.

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1 in 4 pregnant women have mental health problems

A new King’s College London study published Thursday 4 January in The British Journal of Psychiatry, found that 1 in 4 pregnant women have mental health problems. This is more common than previously thought – but two simple questions can help identify these problems so that women can be treated.

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Police-Public Interactions in U.S. Cities

Concern over the nature of police interactions with civilians has long been lurking beneath the surface of public discourse, recently capturing national attention with the advent of smartphone technology and real-time footage of numerous violent incidents.…

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Good days and bad days in dementia

The August International Psychogeriatrics Article of the Month is entitled ‘Good days and bad days in dementia: a qualitative chart review of variable symptom expression’ by Kenneth Rockwood, Sherri Fay, Laura Hamilton, Elyse Ross and Paige Moorhouse.…

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Criminal behavior: Older siblings strongly sway younger siblings close in age | VCU Across the Spectrum

Findings illustrate impact of family environment on violent criminal behavior If a sibling commits a violent criminal act, the risk that a younger sibling may follow in their footsteps is more likely than the transmission of that behavior to an older sibling, according to a new study conducted by researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University and Lund University in Sweden.…

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Long term effects of childhood bullying

Childhood bullying shown to increase likelihood of psychotic experiences in later life New research has shown that being exposed to bullying during childhood will lead to an increased risk of psychotic experiences in adulthood, regardless of whether they are victims or perpetrators.…

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Renaming schizophrenia

The name “Schizophrenia” is the subject of a new Forum in the journal Psychological Medicine. An article written by Bill George and Aadt Klijn, Foreign Affairs co-coordinators for Anoiksis (the Dutch association of and for people with a psychotic vulnerability), has been reflected on by various commentators.…

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Father absence in early childhood linked to depression in adolescent girls

New research from the Children of the 90s study at the University of Bristol shows that girls whose fathers were absent during the first five years of life were more likely to develop depressive symptoms in adolescence than girls whose fathers left when they were aged five to ten years or than boys in both age groups (0-5 and 5-10), even after a range of factors was taken into account.…

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A better diagnostic method for early-onset dementia

Older adults misdiagnosed as showing early signs of dementia by poor diagnostic methods Older people may slip through the net when it comes to early treatment of dementia because the current approach to diagnosis of Mild Cognitive Impairment — an intermediate clinical state between normal aging and dementia — may be inadequate, new research shows.…

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PTSD Symptoms common among ICU survivors

–Condition long linked to war veterans found in one in three ventilated patients One in three people who survived stays in an intensive care unit (ICU) and required use of a mechanical ventilator showed substantial post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms that lasted for up to two years, according to a new Johns Hopkins study of patients with acute lung injury.…

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