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Journal of Affective Disorders Aug 2023Psilocybin therapy is receiving attention as a mental health intervention with transdiagnostic potential. In line with psychotherapeutic research, qualitative research... (Randomized Controlled Trial)
Randomized Controlled Trial
BACKGROUND
Psilocybin therapy is receiving attention as a mental health intervention with transdiagnostic potential. In line with psychotherapeutic research, qualitative research has highlighted the role of reductions in experiential avoidance (and increases in connectedness) within psilocybin therapy. However, no quantitative research has examined experiential avoidance as a mechanism underlying psilocybin therapy's therapeutic effects.
METHOD
Data was used from a double-blind randomized controlled trial that compared psilocybin therapy (two 25 mg psilocybin session plus daily placebo for six weeks) with escitalopram (two 1 mg psilocybin sessions plus 10-20 mg daily escitalopram for six weeks) among individuals with major depressive disorder (N = 59). All participants received psychological support. Experiential avoidance, connectedness, and treatment outcomes were measured at pre-treatment and at a 6 week primary endpoint. Acute psilocybin experiences and psychological insight were also measured.
RESULTS
With psilocybin therapy, but not escitalopram, improvements in mental health outcomes (i.e., well-being, depression severity, suicidal ideation, and trait anxiety) occurred via reductions in experiential avoidance. Exploratory analyses suggested that improvements in mental health (except for suicidal ideation) via reduction in experiential avoidance were serially mediated through increases in connectedness. Additionally, experiences of ego dissolution and psychological insight predicted reductions in experiential avoidance following psilocybin therapy.
LIMITATIONS
Difficulties inferring temporal causality, maintaining blindness to condition, and reliance upon self-report.
CONCLUSIONS
These results provide support for the role of reduced experiential avoidance as a putative mechanism underlying psilocybin therapy's positive therapeutic outcomes. The present findings may help to tailor, refine, and optimize psilocybin therapy and its delivery.
Topics: Humans; Psilocybin; Depressive Disorder, Major; Anxiety; Anxiety Disorders; Treatment Outcome
PubMed: 37146908
DOI: 10.1016/j.jad.2023.04.105 -
Frontiers in Psychology 2023In this review, we discuss major measurement and methodological challenges to studying self-talk. We review the assessment of self-talk frequency, studying self-talk in... (Review)
Review
In this review, we discuss major measurement and methodological challenges to studying self-talk. We review the assessment of self-talk frequency, studying self-talk in its natural context, personal pronoun usage within self-talk, experiential sampling methods, and the experimental manipulation of self-talk. We highlight new possible research opportunities and discuss recent advances such as brain imaging studies of self-talk, the use of self-talk by robots, and measurement of self-talk in aphasic patients.
PubMed: 37465491
DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1210960 -
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis... Jul 2023Correlation has a critical role in the tracking field, especially in recent popular Siamese-based trackers. The correlation operation is a simple fusion method that...
Correlation has a critical role in the tracking field, especially in recent popular Siamese-based trackers. The correlation operation is a simple fusion method that considers the similarity between the template and the search region. However, the correlation operation is a local linear matching process, losing semantic information and easily falling into a local optimum, which may be the bottleneck in designing high-accuracy tracking algorithms. In this work, to determine whether a better feature fusion method exists than correlation, a novel attention-based feature fusion network, inspired by the transformer, is presented. This network effectively combines the template and search region features using attention mechanism. Specifically, the proposed method includes an ego-context augment module based on self-attention and a cross-feature augment module based on cross-attention. First, we present a transformer tracking (named TransT) method based on the Siamese-like feature extraction backbone, the designed attention-based fusion mechanism, and the classification and regression heads. Based on the TransT baseline, we also design a segmentation branch to generate the accurate mask. Finally, we propose a stronger version of TransT by extending it with a multi-template scheme and an IoU prediction head, named TransT-M. Experiments show that our TransT and TransT-M methods achieve promising results on seven popular benchmarks. Code and models are available at https://github.com/chenxin-dlut/TransT-M.
PubMed: 37015509
DOI: 10.1109/TPAMI.2022.3232535 -
Journal of Clinical Medicine Mar 2024Atopic dermatitis (AD) is a common chronic inflammatory skin condition characterised by pruritus and recurrent eczematous patches and plaques. It impacts sleep and its... (Review)
Review
Atopic dermatitis (AD) is a common chronic inflammatory skin condition characterised by pruritus and recurrent eczematous patches and plaques. It impacts sleep and its visibility can lead to stigmatisation, low self-esteem, social withdrawal, reduced quality of life (QOL), and psychological burden. This study explores the relationship between AD and mental health, including possible causation pathways. A literature review was conducted in PubMed without using limiters. AD carries higher odds of suicidality and an increased risk of depression, anxiety, alexithymia, and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) across all severities. While some studies report an association of AD with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and possibly autism spectrum disorder (ASD), others do not. There is increasing evidence that AD contributes to chronic low-grade inflammation and cognitive impairment (CI). Causative factors for mental health complications of AD likely include both psychosocial and biological variables. AD is associated with higher levels of cutaneous and circulating proinflammatory cytokines; these can breach the blood-brain barrier and trigger central nervous system events, including oxidative stress, neurotransmitter breakdown, altered serotonin metabolism, and reduced neurogenesis in several brain regions. Excessive inflammation in AD may thus contribute to CI, depression, and suicidality. AD providers should be vigilant about mental health.
PubMed: 38541828
DOI: 10.3390/jcm13061602 -
Schizophrenia Research Jul 2024Despite the historically consolidated psychopathological perspective, on the one hand, contemporary organicistic psychiatry often highlights abnormalities in... (Review)
Review
Despite the historically consolidated psychopathological perspective, on the one hand, contemporary organicistic psychiatry often highlights abnormalities in neurotransmitter systems like dysregulation of dopamine transmission, neural circuitry, and genetic factors as key contributors to schizophrenia. Neuroscience, on the other, has so far almost entirely neglected the first-person experiential dimension of this syndrome, mainly focusing on high-order cognitive functions, such as executive function, working memory, theory of mind, and the like. An alternative view posits that schizophrenia is a self-disorder characterized by anomalous self-experience and awareness. This view may not only shed new light on the psychopathological features of psychosis but also inspire empirical research targeting the bodily and neurobiological changes underpinning this disorder. Cognitive neuroscience can today address classic topics of phenomenological psychopathology by adding a new level of description, finally enabling the correlation between the first-person experiential aspects of psychiatric diseases and their neurobiological roots. Recent empirical evidence on the neurobiological basis of a minimal notion of the self, the bodily self, is presented. The relationship between the body, its motor potentialities and the notion of minimal self is illustrated. Evidence on the neural mechanisms underpinning the bodily self, its plasticity, and the blurring of self-other distinction in schizophrenic patients is introduced and discussed. It is concluded that brain-body function anomalies of multisensory integration, differential processing of self- and other-related bodily information mediating self-experience, might be at the basis of the disruption of the self disorders characterizing schizophrenia.
Topics: Humans; Schizophrenia; Self Concept; Ego; Schizophrenic Psychology; Body Image; Brain
PubMed: 38815468
DOI: 10.1016/j.schres.2024.05.014 -
Journal of Affective Disorders Aug 2023Bipolar disorder is a severe and chronic mental illness characterized by recurrent major depressive episodes and mania or hypomania. In addition to the burden of the... (Review)
Review
BACKGROUND
Bipolar disorder is a severe and chronic mental illness characterized by recurrent major depressive episodes and mania or hypomania. In addition to the burden of the disease and its consequences, self-stigma can impact people with bipolar disorder. This review investigates the current state of research in self-stigma in bipolar disorder.
METHODS
An electronic search was carried out until February 2022. Three academic databases were systematically searched, and best-evidence synthesis was made.
RESULTS
Sixty-six articles were related to self-stigma in bipolar disorder. Seven key themes were extracted from these studies: 1/ Comparison of self-stigma in bipolar disorder and other mental illnesses, 2/ Sociocultural context and self-stigma, 3/ Correlates and predictors of self-stigma, 4/ Consequences of self-stigma, 5/ Treatments and self-stigma, 6/ Management of self-stigma, and 7/ Self-stigma and recovery in bipolar disorder.
LIMITATIONS
Firstly, a meta-analysis could not be performed due to the heterogeneity of the studies. Secondly, limiting the search to self-stigma has excluded other forms of stigma that also have an impact. Thirdly, the under-reporting of negative or nonsignificant results due to publication bias and unpublished studies might have limited the accuracy of this reviews' synthesis.
CONCLUSION
Research on self-stigma in persons with bipolar disorder has been the focused on different aspects, and interventions to reduce self-stigmatization have been developed, but evidence of their effectiveness is still sparse. Clinicians need to be attentive to self-stigma, its assessment, and its empowerment in their daily clinical practice. Future work is required to establish valid strategies to fight self-stigma.
Topics: Humans; Bipolar Disorder; Depressive Disorder, Major; Social Stigma; Mania
PubMed: 37207946
DOI: 10.1016/j.jad.2023.05.041 -
Children (Basel, Switzerland) Jul 2023Previous studies have linked self-compassion to mental health, specifically anxiety, in non-clinical adolescents, suggesting that self-compassion can be a protective...
Previous studies have linked self-compassion to mental health, specifically anxiety, in non-clinical adolescents, suggesting that self-compassion can be a protective factor against anxiety. This study compared the overall level of self-compassion and (un)compassionate self-responding in adolescents with and without an anxiety disorder and assessed the association between self-compassion and anxiety. This cross-sectional study included adolescents (12-19 years) with an anxiety disorder (N = 23) and a reference group (N = 28). Participants completed the Self-Compassion Scale (SCS) and State Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI). Results showed that overall self-compassion and uncompassionate self-responding were significantly lower and higher in the clinical than the reference group, respectively, while compassionate self-responding did not differ between groups. In the clinical group, only uncompassionate self-responding was significantly associated with higher anxiety. In the reference group, uncompassionate self-responding showed a significant positive association with anxiety, and compassionate self-responding showed a significant negative association with anxiety. Although the results suggest that low uncompassionate self-responding may buffer against anxiety, the role of compassionate and uncompassionate self-responding remains unclear. An alternative explanation is that the uncompassionate self-responding items measure the presence of psychopathology in adolescents with an anxiety disorder. More research on the construct validity of the SCS uncompassionate self-responding scale is needed.
PubMed: 37508678
DOI: 10.3390/children10071181 -
JPMA. the Journal of the Pakistan... Nov 2023To examine and predict the relationship among sociotropy-autonomy, self- criticism and self-esteem in individuals with or without depression.
OBJECTIVE
To examine and predict the relationship among sociotropy-autonomy, self- criticism and self-esteem in individuals with or without depression.
METHODS
The cross-sectional, case-control study was conducted from November 2021 to July 2022 in various government hospitals and universities in Lahore, Pakistan, and comprised depression patients of either gender aged 20-40 years in group A. Healthy subjects matched for age and gender were enrolled in control group B. Data was collected using a demographic sheet predesigned in Urdu language, and the Urdu versions of Personal Style Inventory, Form of Self- Criticism/Attacking and Self-Reassuring Scale, and the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale. Data was analysed using SPSS 21.
RESULTS
Of the 200 subjects, 100(50%) were males, while each of the two groups had 100(50%) subjects. The overall mean age of the sample was 27.93±5.23 years. Sociotropy-autonomy had a significant positive relationship with self-criticism (p<0.01) and a significant negative relationship with self-esteem (p<0.01). Self-criticism was significantly negatively correlated with self-esteem (p<0.01). Sociotropy-autonomy was a significant predictor of self-criticism and self-esteem (p<0.01). Inter-group comparison of the levels of sociotropy-autonomy, self-criticism and self-esteem were significant (p<0.05).
CONCLUSIONS
Sociotropy-autonomy was a highly significant predictor of self-criticism and self-esteem. People with depression had high sociotropy-autonomy and self-criticism scores, and low scores in self-esteem.
Topics: Male; Humans; Young Adult; Adult; Female; Depression; Self-Assessment; Case-Control Studies; Cross-Sectional Studies; Personal Autonomy
PubMed: 38013527
DOI: 10.47391/JPMA.8189