E-Clinical High Risk for Psychosis: Viewpoint on Potential of Digital Innovations for Preventive Psychiatry

E-mental health is an emerging area of research that has the potential to overcome some of the current barriers to progress in working with people at clinical high risk for psychosis (CHR-P). This article provides an overview of how e-mental health could be used in the detection, prediction, and treatment in the CHR-P population. Specifically, we evaluate e-detection, e-prediction, and e-therapeutics for this clinical population. E-mental health holds great promise to improve current management of CHR-P individuals.

What is forensic psychotherapy? Reflections on a new discipline

This article aims to make a clear definition of forensic psychotherapy to help understand some of the theoretical and practical implications and breakthroughs this new discipline makes possible, including the enlargement of our ability to understand the causes and prevention of violent and other antisocial behaviours. All human behaviour and functioning, whether sick or healthy, life-threatening or life supporting, antisocial or prosocial, is caused by, or is a product of, the differences in individuals’ life experiences, such as child abuse or other forms of trauma, vs healthy and secure bonding and attachment experiences and their resulting character structure. In addition, other data concerning the causes of differences in the rates of individual as well as collective (e.g. political) violence, that is the epidemiology of violence, can only be understood and explained by referring to social forces and processes. I will examine how forensic psychotherapy is similar to and different from the many related disciplines that also deal with the various problems that arise in human interactions and social relations, such as violence and sexual abuse. Among those disciplines we may include forensic psychiatry; clinical psychiatry, psychology and psychotherapy, including psychoanalysis; public health and preventive psychiatry and the social sciences, as well as moral philosophy and its derivatives and subsidiaries in the quest for justice; namely, law and politics.

E-Clinical High Risk for Psychosis: Viewpoint on Potential of Digital Innovations for Preventive Psychiatry (Preprint)

UNSTRUCTURED E-mental health is an emerging area of research that has the potential to overcome some of the current barriers to progress in working with people at clinical high risk for psychosis (CHR-P). This article provides an overview of how e-mental health could be used in the detection, prediction, and treatment in the CHR-P population. Specifically, we evaluate e-detection, e-prediction, and e-therapeutics for this clinical population. E-mental health holds great promise to improve current management of CHR-P individuals.

Current challenges for psychiatry in Greece

Psychiatry in Greece is undergoing a prolonged reform. Deinstitutionalisation is at an advanced stage and there are active efforts to support primary care and community psychiatry, and to establish local administration of services in each sector of the country (i.e. the equivalent of Mental Health Trusts in the UK). Quality assurance and continuing professional development require further development, as do a series of other issues pertaining to the day-to-day clinical practice of psychiatrists. Recent economic difficulties have undoubtedly affected the mental health of the population, but also mental health services and psychiatrists themselves. These financial difficulties coupled with pre-existing organisational issues present important, yet rectifiable, challenges. We conclude by identifying preventive psychiatry as an especially important target for progress and by advocating for continued support for the public system of mental healthcare as well as for the continued psychiatric reform.