Psychiatric classifi cations categorize how patients present to mental healthcare professionals and are necessarily utilitarian. From the clinician’s perspective, the most important goal of a psychiatric classifi cation is to assist them in managing their patients’ psychiatric conditions by facilitating the selection of effective interventions and predicting management needs and outcomes. Due t...

The potential for artificial intelligences and robotics in achieving the capacity of consciousness, sentience and rationality offers the prospect that these agents have minds. If so, then there may be a potential for these minds to become dysfunctional, or for artificial intelligences and robots to suffer from mental illness. The existence of artificially intelligent psychopathology can be inte...

Fifty-four billion dollars was spent on alcohol/ drug abuse and mental health treatment in 1990. These expenditures were concentrated in the area of inpatient psychiatric care and on persons with severe mental health and substance abuse problems. The data on expenditure patterns for mental health and substance abuse care suggest that successful health care reform in this area must implement mec...

Mental rotation is the most distinctly specialized operation of the imagination, one characterized precisely enough psychophysically for parametric study, thereby making it an optimal prospect for isolating and modeling its neural mechanisms. New human brain mapping studies using direct cortical stimulation and repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation isolate an area in right superior parie...

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to evaluate the defense mechanisms used by depressive and anxious patients without comorbidities compared to those used by controls and to determine whether these patterns differ between diagnoses. METHOD The sample was composed of 167 psychiatric patients and 36 controls that were evaluated using the Defense Style Questionnaire 40. All subjects were evalua...

BACKGROUND Time and resource efficient mental disorder screening mechanisms are not available to identify the growing number of refugees and other forcibly displaced persons in priority need for mental health care. The aim of this study was to identify efficient screening instruments and mechanisms for the detection of moderate and severe mental disorders in a refugee setting. METHODS Lay int...

This study examined longitudinal changes in coping and defense mechanisms in an ageand genderstratified sample of 392 European-American adults. Nonlinear age-related changes were found for the coping mechanisms of sublimation and suppression and the defense mechanisms of intellectualization, doubt, displacement, and regression. The change trajectories for sublimation and suppression showed that...

BACKGROUND  Ego defense mechanisms are unconscious psychological processes that help an individual to prevent anxiety when exposed to a stressful situation. These mechanisms are important in psychiatric practice to assess an individual's personality dynamics, psychopathologies, and modes of coping with stressful situations, and hence, to design appropriate individualized treatment. Our study de...