My name is Zara, and my illness struck me at the tender age of 18 and carried on into my adult life. An illness like psychosis challenges your sense of self and how you relate to others and the world around you. I am now passionate about education around psychosis and extinguishing stigma. Here are some of the ways life is different after you've experienced psychosis.
Long-acting injectable antipsychotics (LAI) can optimize adherence for high-risk serious mental illness (SMI). This customized adherence-enhancement approach delivered by social worker interventionists was combined with LAI (CAE-L) of paliperidone palmitate for homeless, poorly adherent individuals with SMI. SSSFT staff can use the OVID link, or you can request a copy of this article by replying to this email. Please ensure you are clear which article you are requesting.
Case study. Login at top right hand side of page using your SSSFT NHS Athens for full text. SSOTP - request a copy of the article from the library http://bit.ly/1Xyazai
In the last couple of years, schizophrenia was often discussed as autoimmune disease. Several antibodies were suspected, but so far there has been no proof of Gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) receptor antibodies in patients with schizophrenia. Case presentation
In this case report we present a 21-year old woman with schizophrenic symptoms, who showed anti-GABAB1 antibodies when screened by a vast recombinant neurology mosaic on Human Embryonic Kidney Cells 293 (HEK293) cells. The young woman presented with various psychotic symptoms as well as speech and motor ataxia, with the neurological signs starting in childhood.
A Case of Mutism in Noncatatonic Schizophrenia Responding to Small Dose of Fluvoxamine Addition to Clozapine. You can request a copy of this article by replying to this email. Please ensure you are clear which article you are requesting.
Ritualistic behaviors are common in obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), while catatonic stupor occasionally occurs in psychotic or mood disorders. Schizoaffective disorder is a specific mental disorder involving both psychotic and affective symptoms. The syndrome usually represents a specific diagnosis, as in the case of the 10th edition of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) or the 5th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). However, symptom-based diagnosis can result in misdiagnosis and hinder effective treatment. Few cases of ritualistic behaviors and catatonic stupor associated with schizoaffective disorder have been reported. Risperidone and modified electroconvulsive therapy (MECT) were effective in our case.
Open access. Cardiometabolic health significantly impacts on the mortality of people with severe mental illness. Clozapine has the greatest efficacy for Treatment Resistant Schizophrenia (TRS) but the greatest negative impact on cardiometabolic health. Balancing the risks and benefits of treatment, dignity, autonomy, liberty, mental and physical health can be challenging, particularly when imposing interventions with potentially life threatening adverse events, such as clozapine. We describe the successful administration of clozapine in the face of myocardial infarction, pulmonary embolism and hyperlipidaemia resulting in the termination of long-term seclusion for a gentleman with TRS in high secure psychiatric services.
Parents experiencing psychosis can face challenges in addition to those usually associated with being a parent, with their children at increased risk of negative outcomes. Although a strong evidence base has shown that family interventions for psychosis (FIp) can mitigate distress for adult relatives, techniques described in the systemic and parenting literature to facilitate the inclusion of children in family therapy are largely absent from the FIp literature and training. This study used a three‐round Delphi survey to investigate what experienced FIp clinicians consider to be best practice regarding the inclusion of children in parental FIp.. To read the full article, log in using your NHS Athens details. To access full-text: click “Log in/Register” (top right hand side). Click ‘Institutional Login’ then select 'OpenAthens Federation', then ‘NHS England’. Enter your Athens details to view the article.
Identification of robust biomarkers that predict individualized response to antipsychotic treatment at the early stage of psychotic disorders remains a challenge in precision psychiatry. The aim of this study was to investigate whether any functional connectome-based neural traits could serve as such a biomarker. To read the full article, choose Open Athens “Institutional Login” and search for “Midlands Partnership”.
BPS blog post by Christian Jarrett. Hearing voices that don’t exist in the outside world is the most common form of hallucination experienced by people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia or related conditions and it can be very distressing. However, there is a growing recognition that hearing voices is not always pathological. Many mentally well people hear voices (or “auditory verbal hallucinations”) – in fact, around 6-7 per cent of adults in the general population report having had such experiences at some point in their lives.
This has led some experts to propose a “continuum model” in which the same fundamental underlying mechanism leads to hearing voices in healthy people and in patients with a clinical diagnosis, but that for various reasons, such as a traumatic past, the experience is more troublesome and distressing for the patients. However, a new open-access paper in Schizophrenia Bulletin challenges the continuum model, finding an important brain difference between patients who hear voices and voice-hearing healthy controls.
Blogpost. The message from recent surveys is that it’s not just people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia who hear voices in their heads, many people considered mentally well do to. This revelation may have a welcome de-stigmatising effect in terms of how people think about some of the symptoms associated with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, but a new study published in Psychosis asks us to hang on a minute – to say that one “hears voices” can mean different things to different people.
This study aimed to establish a prediction model of quetiapine concentration in patients with schizophrenia and depression, based on real-world data via machine learning techniques to assist clinical regimen decisions. To read the full article, choose Open Athens “Institutional Login” and search for “Midlands Partnership”.
Most voice hearers report childhood trauma. Many voice hearers report comorbid post-traumatic stress symptoms and that the content of their voices (auditory verbal hallucinations) is directly (voices repeat phrases spoken by perpetrators) or indirectly (voice content and trauma is thematically similar) related to their trauma. The factors that maintain trauma-related voices are unknown, and there is limited research in this area. This study aimed to identify potential maintaining factors of trauma-related voices by reviewing models of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and positive symptoms of psychosis. Open access article- no login required
We constructed a parameterized, rate-based neural model of on-center/off-surround neurons in the early visual system to investigate the impacts of changes to the excitatory and inhibitory receptive field subfields. Open access article - no login required
Negative symptoms are a primary cause of disability in schizophrenia for which there are no established pharmacotherapies. This study evaluated a novel psychosocial intervention that combined two evidence-based practices—motivational interviewing and cognitive-behavioral therapy (MI-CBT)—for the treatment of motivational negative symptoms. To read the full article, choose Open Athens “Institutional Login” and search for “Midlands Partnership”.
The current pilot study aimed to evaluate whether individuals at CHR showed changes in emotional and stigma-related experiences following a CHR psychoeducation intervention, BEGIN: Brief Educational Guide for Individuals in Need. To read the full article, choose Open Athens “Institutional Login” and search for “Midlands Partnership”.
Psychiatric Rehabilitation Journal Vol. 41, Iss. 2, (Jun 2018): 109-117.
Objective: There is a paucity of accessible, evidence-based tools for caregivers of individuals with schizophrenia. This study examines changes in the self-assessed and caregiver-assessed outcomes of people with schizophrenia after exposure to a cognitive adaptation training (CAT) guide that addressed pragmatic, in-home approaches to offset the cognitive impacts of the illness.. To read the full article, log in using your NHS OpenAthens details.
Open access. Studies analyzing concentration-effect relationships in second-generation antipsychotics have reported contradictory results in chronic schizophrenia. No data are available for the early stages of the disease. The present study aims to evaluate the association between a single olanzapine plasma concentration, clinical response, and severity of adverse effects in first-episode psychosis (FEP); to test the utility of various plasma breakpoints as markers of early response to treatment; and to identify variables affecting olanzapine concentrations.
A. Laenen, T. Vangeneugden, H. Geys, und G. Molenberghs. The British journal of mathematical and statistical psychology, 59 (Pt 1):
113-31(Mai 2006)Mesures de concordància; Online; ICC; Psiquiatria.