Current Psychiatry Reviews - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2007

With this issue Current Psychiatry Reviews marks the beginning of its third year of publication. We are making excellent progress in terms of the quantity and quality of the review articles that have been submitted to Current Psychiatry Reviews. The group of articles included herein nicely illustrates the breadth of topics covered by our journal. What you will find in Volume 3, issue 1 is a sampler of contemporary psychiatry. Read More

Sensation seeking (SS) is a personality trait defined by a need to seek novel sensations and experiences, accompanied by a willingness to take risks for the sake of such experiences. Various measures of SS have been developed and validated, including a scale specifically for children. Among different populations, SS has been associated with the expression of various health-related risk behaviors, most notably substance use a Read More

The role of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) in treating patients with schizophrenia remains unclear. This paper aims to determine whether ECT results in clinically meaningful benefit with regard to psychopathology, behavior and functioning for patients with schizophrenia, and whether variations in the practical administration of ECT influences outcome. Existing research in the field and the new information of research i Read More

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is associated with schizophrenia, but the causal nature of this relationship is not clear. Three models for their association exist: 1) TBI causes a phenocopy of schizophrenia (parallelism); 2) TBI is a marker of schizophrenia vulnerability (spurious association); and 3) TBI interacts with genetic vulnerability to cause schizophrenia (interaction or effect modification). We found that TBI is a causal c Read More

The possibility of a causal link between major mental disorders (MMDs) and violence has been the matter of a debate for decades in psychiatry. Just as a consensus seemed to emerge, a standout and unprecedented large-scale community investigation lead to contradictory conclusions. The main goal of this review was to provide clinicians with a critical summarizing of all major relevant studies published during 15 years. It is concl Read More

There is controversy as to whether compulsory community treatment (CCT) reduces health service use, or improves clinical outcome and social functioning. Given the widespread use of such powers in North America, Europe and Australasia, it is important to assess the benefits and potential harms of this type of legislation. Unfortunately, evidence for their effectiveness remains weak. In our Cochrane systematic review we w Read More

An updated review of Supportive-Expressive (SE) psychotherapy is presented. The concepts, techniques and research methods of SE therapy are described, and empirical evidence is reviewed. Articles on SE therapy published between 1970 and 2006 were identified by a computerized search using Pubmed, MEDLINE, PsycINFO and Current Contents. In November 2006, the search was updated using database-specific keywords Read More

While interest has grown steadily in understanding how persons with schizophrenia appraise their disorder and subsequently move towards recovery, the nature of the impact of awareness or admission of schizophrenia on various domains of quality of life has remained a matter of debate. At the level of both theory and empirical study, it has been alternately argued that acknowledgement of one's mental illness is a Read More

Clinical evidence suggests that initial attempts to regulate weight gain quickly become habit-like in individuals with eating disorders. These behaviors are controlled excessively in patients with Anorexia Nervosa (AN) and are controlled more intermittently, with periods of lost control, in patients with Bulimia Nervosa (BN). We suspect that abnormalities in frontostriatal systems that subserve self-regulatory control and hab Read More