‘An Apple a Day’?: Psychiatrists, Psychologists and Psychotherapists Report Poor Literacy for Nutritional Medicine: International Survey Spanning 52 Countries

Nutritional interventions have beneficial effects on certain psychiatric disorder symptomatology and common physical health comorbidities. However, studies evaluating nutritional literacy in mental health professionals (MHP) are scarce. This study aimed to assess the across 52 countries. Surveys were distributed via colleagues and professional societies. Data were collected regarding self-reported general nutrition knowledge, nutrition education, learning opportunities, and the tendency to recommend food supplements or prescribe specific diets in clinical practice. In total, 1056 subjects participated in the study: 354 psychiatrists, 511 psychologists, 44 psychotherapists, and 147 MHPs in-training. All participants believed the diet quality of individuals with mental disorders was poorer compared to the general population (p < 0.001). The majority of the psychiatrists (74.2%) and psychologists (66.3%) reported having no training in nutrition. Nevertheless, many of them used nutrition approaches, with 58.6% recommending supplements and 43.8% recommending specific diet strategies to their patients. Only 0.8% of participants rated their education regarding nutrition as ‘very good.’ Almost all (92.9%) stated they would like to expand their knowledge regarding ‘Nutritional Psychiatry.’ There is an urgent need to integrate nutrition education into MHP training, ideally in collaboration with nutrition experts to achieve best practice care.

Computational psychiatry 2.0 and implications for stress research

Stress-related disorders are highly prevalent in modern society and pose significant challenge to human’s health. Being recently emerged branch of psychiatry, computational psychiatry is geared toward mathematical modeling of psychiatric disorders. Harnessing power of computer sciences and statistics may bridge the complex nature of psychiatric illnesses with hidden brain computational mechanisms. Stress represents an adaptive response to environmental threats but, while getting chronic, it leads to progressive deflection from homeostasis or result in buildup of allostatic load, providing researches with unique opportunity to track patterns of deviations from adaptive responding toward full-blown disease development. Computational psychiatry toolkit enables us to quantitatively assess the extent of such deviations, to explicitly test competing hypotheses which compare the models with real data for goodness-of-fit and, finally, to tethering these computational operations to structural or functional brain alterations as may be revealed by non-invasive neuroimaging and stimulation techniques.It is worth noting that brain does not directly face environmental demands imposed on human or animal, but rather through detecting signals and acting out via bodily systems. Therefore, it is of critical importance to take homeostatic and allostatic mechanisms into account when considering sophisticated interactions between brain and body and how their partnership may result in establishment of stress-susceptible or resilient profiles.In this article, with a particulate focus on brain-gut interactions, we outline several possible directions to widen the scope of application of computational approach in mental health care field trying to integrate computational psychiatry, psychosomatics and nutritional medicine