Interviews with spouses of individually referred psychiatric outpatients reveal relevant complaints about the ways the spouses have been approached by previous psychotherapists of their patient-partner. Suggestions are given to incorporate these complaints into efficient strategies for the involvement of spouses in the treatment of the patients.

Seventy patients were brought restrained to a Psychiatric outpatient department over a three month period, with the commonest site of restraint being the wrist. They were compared with controls and it was found that restrained patients were more likely to be younger, belonging to a lower socioeconomic status, from a rural background and were more likely to be diagnosed as manic. The significanc...

Depression, hopelessness, and low self-esteem are implicated as vulnerability factors for suicide ideation. The association of self-esteem with suicide ideation after controlling for depressed mood and hopelessness was examined. Adult psychiatric outpatients (N = 338) completed measures of self-esteem, suicide ideation, hopelessness, and depression. Self-esteem was operationalized as beliefs ab...

OBJECTIVE This study examined whether dimensions of complicated grief (CG) could be distinguished from dimensions of depression and whether these dimensions were differentially affected by group psychotherapy for CG. METHOD A total of 398 psychiatric outpatients who had experienced one or more significant death losses provided ratings on standard measures of grief and depression. Factor analy...

Narcissistic personality disorder is the subject of extensive discussion in the literature. Yet, the validity of this diagnostic category remains questionable. This is owed, in large part, to the relative absence of empirical work that has examined narcissism in clinical samples. Descriptions and findings from studies involving non-clinical samples suggest that narcissism is associated with con...

The present study was conducted to investigate the frequency and types of life events experienced by psychiatric outpatients and to compare these with the events experienced by a control sample consisting of their normal relatives. One hundred and sixty-six patients and an equal number of marked controls were studied. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with the help of an event list. Res...

BACKGROUND A hospital-based global budget (GB) program was implemented by the Taiwan Bureau of National Health Insurance (TBNHI) to control the rising costs of medical care. We investigated whether the introduction of the GB program affected prescriptions for second-generation antipsychotics (SGAs) for schizophrenic outpatients in public and private medical and psychiatric centers. METHODS Th...

The aim of this study was to investigate the association between object relations and emotional processing deficits among a general sample of psychiatric outpatients. The sample consisted of 104 patients consecutively referred to 2 outpatient clinics. Participants completed measures of object relations, emotional processing deficits, and general psychiatric distress. After controlling for the e...

BACKGROUND Sick leave from work due to psychiatric disorders is a major public health problem, not only in Japan but also worldwide. As males and females in Japan tend to differ in their approach to work, a gender difference in perfectionism might be expected. We investigated the background factors leading to long-term absence from work due to sickness among psychiatric outpatients in Japan. ...

BACKGROUND The Control Preferences Scale (CPS) is the most frequently used measure of patients' preferred roles in treatment decisions. The aim of this study was to provide data about the validity of CPS in psychiatric care of patients with emotional disorders. METHODS The original CPS was translated to Spanish using the process of cross-cultural adaptation of self-reported measures as the me...