Current Psychiatry Reviews - Volume 2, Issue 4, 2006

Bipolar disorder remains a serious public health problem with a significant personal and economic burden. In line with the widespread recognition of the value of active patient involvement in their care, daily mood charting may increase the patient's understanding of their condition and improve adherence with complex medication regimes. Knowledge about the course and pattern of an individual's disorder may also allo Read More

One central issue in schizophrenia research is to identify and characterize behavioral and biological markers that are intrinsic to the complex psychiatric disorder and that can serve as targets for detection, treatment, and prevention. A trait marker represents the properties of the behavioral and biological processes that play an antecedent, possibly causal, role in the pathophysiology of the psychiatric disorder, whe Read More

Many of the positive symptoms of schizophrenia, including hallucinations and passivity phenomena, have been related to dysfunction within association cortices. In addition, many of the cognitive deficits observed in patients with schizophrenia can also be characterised as impairments of higher level cognitions known to depend on these same association cortices. While most attention has been directed towards dysfunctio Read More

The striatum and its dense dopaminergic innervation originating in the substantia nigra pars compacta and the ventral tegmental area compose the mesostriatal dopamine system. The nigrostriatal system is particularly involved in habit learning and in motor coordination; the dopaminergic projections from the ventral tegmental area to the ventral striatum are most well known for their role in shaping behaviors leading to re Read More

Childhood-onset schizophrenia (COS; defined as onset by age 12) is rare, difficult to diagnose, and represents a severe and chronic phenotype of the adult illness. A study of childhood onset psychoses has been ongoing at the NIMH since 1990, where children with childhood onset schizophrenia (COS) and severe atypical psychoses (provisionally labeled “multidimensionally impaired” or MDI by the NIMH team) are studied. Familial Read More

Studies have shown that hallucinations and delusions occur in a number of different populations including psychiatric and non-psychiatric patients and in non clinical (i.e. normal) individuals. However, the majority of these studies have included adult populations. The goal of the present article is to review the research on hallucinations and delusions in children and adolescents. The prevalence, characteristics and nature of halluci Read More

Non-adherence to treatment of patients with psychotic disorders is related to higher rates of relapse, hospitalization, and suicide. Important predictors of non-adherence include poor social structure, cognitive deficits, negative medication attitude, side effects, depression, a sealing-over recovery style, feelings of stigmatization, denial of treatment need, and lack of insight. Attempts to improve adherence have shown that Read More