OBJECTIVE Many health care organizations are giving feedback to mental health care providers about their performance on quality indicators. Mental health care providers may be more likely to respond to this feedback if they believe the indicators are meaningful and within their "sphere of influence." The authors surveyed frontline mental health care providers to elicit their perceptions of wide...

Male and female rats respond to a fearful experience in different ways, but this was not previously taken into account in research into psychiatric disorders.

Sensitive responding to others' emotional body expressions is an essential social skill in humans. Using event-related brain potentials, it has recently been shown that the ability to discriminate between emotional body expressions develops between 4 and 8 months of age. However, it is not clear whether the perception of emotional body expressions in others evokes sensitive brain responses link...

BACKGROUND It is a qualitative design study that examines points of divergence and convergence in the perspectives on recovery of 36 participants or 12 triads. Each triad comprising a patient, a family member/friend, a care provider and documents the procedural, analytic of triangulating perspectives as a means of understanding the recovery process which is illustrated by four case studies. Var...

Applying for asylum in the United States can be a strenuous process for both applicants and immigration attorneys. Mental health professionals with expertise in asylum law and refugee trauma can make important contributions to such cases. Not only can mental health professionals provide diagnostic information that may support applicants' claims, but they can evaluate how culture and mental heal...

People need to understand why an instance of suffering occurred and what purpose it might have. One widespread account of suffering is a repressive suffering construal (RSC): interpreting suffering as occurring because people deviate from social norms and as having the purpose of reinforcing the social order. Based on the theorizing of Emile Durkheim and others, we propose that RSC is associate...

BACKGROUND Little research has examined the interactive effect of cancer status and race/ethnicity on mental health. As such, the present study examined the mental health of adults, 18 and over, diagnosed with cancer. This study examined the extent to which a cancer diagnosis is related to poorer mental health because it erodes finances and the extent to which the mental health impact of cancer...

An exploratory, qualitative experiment sheds light on the depictive theory of mental imagery. The study analyzes the very operations subjects undertake when solving visuospatial tasks. Preliminary results indicate that subjects do not make use of stable mental images: instead, they continuously assemble and reassemble different perspectives through the guidance of heuristics and prototypes. The...

Psychiatric treatment can enhance human morality. It can promote the emergence of moral motives and intentions, aid in the acquisition of skills essential to moral action, and help to develop the ability to apply moral understanding and skills in particular circumstances. Good psychiatric practice demands an honest appraisal of its moral dimension.