The use of psychedelic substances such as LSD, psilocybin, and dimethyltryptamine is currently being re-evaluated for their therapeutic potential in psychiatry. While international clinical research had started in the 2010s, France only initiated its first psychedelic trials in 2024. This study aimed to explore the knowledge, perceptions, and attitudes of French mental health professionals...
L'EncephaleJuly 1, 2026Ana Beatriz Pereira de Oliveira, Matthieu Hein
INTRODUCTION Given the contrasting results available in the literature, the objective of this systematic review was to investigate the specific impact of illicit use of classic psychedelics (psilocybin, LSD, DMT, mescaline) on suicidality (suicidal ideation, suicide planning, suicide attempts, suicides). METHOD According to PRISMA criteria, a systematic review of the literature was carried out...
Hyperonirism, or "epic dreaming," is an emerging clinical phenomenon characterized by excessive, vivid, and continuous dream activity associated with non-restorative sleep and daytime fatigue. Despite historical descriptions, it remains poorly defined and unrecognized by current nosological systems. We describe four patients assessed in expert sleep and psychiatry centers, presenting with...
Suicidal behaviors-including suicidal ideation, suicide attempts, and suicide deaths-represent a major global health concern. Identifying proximal, modifiable risk factors is crucial to improve early detection and prevention. Sleep disturbances have emerged as proximal and modifiable risk factor for suicide, yet their role is often underestimated in clinical practice. This chapter synthesizes...
BACKGROUND: Nightmare complaints are common among individuals with psychiatric disorders and are associated with significant emotional distress and functional impairment. Despite their clinical relevance, they remain frequently under-recognized and under-treated in psychiatric settings. OBJECTIVE: To offer a pragmatic, clinician-oriented framework for the evaluation and management of nightmare...
Major depressive disorder (MDD) represents a colossal worldwide burden of health, affecting more than 350 million individuals. While traditional antidepressants with mechanisms of action at the serotonin, dopamine, or norepinephrine pathways are routinely prescribed, approximately one-third of patients fail to achieve adequate remission and develop treatment-resistant depression (TRD). This...
L'EncephaleApril 7, 2026Déborah Eymond, Alyson Miquel, Anais Duffaud et al.
Military personnel are frequently exposed to traumatic situations that can lead to chronic post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). PTSD complicates their reintegration due to the high risk of retraumatization. To support the reintegration of injured servicemen and women, the army has developed the Omega program which includes courses at the Centre des Blessés de l'Armée de Terre (CReBAT). These...
This paper is a French translation of the Examination of Anomalous Fantasy and Imagination (EAFI), an instrument for a semi-structured, phenomenological exploration of psychopathology of imagination, particularly within the schizophrenia-spectrum. In this paper, we provide a French translation of the EAFI together with an introduction about the phenomenology of imagination and its experiential...
L'EncephaleAugust 1, 2025Yara Bachir, Raymond Kassab, C. Hallal et al.
OBJECTIVE This case report explores the efficacy of intravenous Ketamine in treating active suicidal ideation in a 24-year-old female with comorbid major depressive disorder (MDD), borderline personality disorder (BPD), posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and functional neurological disorder (FND). CASE DESCRIPTION The patient, with a history of multiple suicide attempts and...
Current antidepressants have shown certain limitations in the treatment of unipolar depression. Their long onset of action, interactions, and side effects are obstacles to achieving lasting remission of this prevalent, often chronic or recurrent, pathology. Faced with this clinical necessity, research efforts have intensified in recent years around psychedelic drugs, with a particular focus on...
Complex bodily hallucinations are not rare in psychiatric, neurological and toxicological conditions and may also be reported even in the total absence of any medical condition. Despite this, they are usually not clinically assessed independently from (and in comparison to) hallucinations in other modalities. The objective of this study was to develop a short scale assessing complex bodily...
Current scientific literature supports classical psychedelic efficacy in many psychiatric disorders. However, less attention has been given to the neurological effects of these substances. The aim of this medical thesis was to conduct a systematic review examining the neuroimaging correlates of the effects of psychedelics. We performed an electronic research through Medline and Science Direct...
L'EncephaleSeptember 1, 2024Zélie Billion, M. Hein
INTRODUCTION Cannabis is the most consumed illicit substance in Europe. Although its sale and use remain generally prohibited, European public policies have evolved in recent years by legalizing cannabis for medical use and considering its legalization for recreational use. However, in the literature there are arguments in favor of a particular relationship between cannabis consumption and the...
Mindfulness meditation has gained prominence in somatic and psychiatric care in several countries including France. Studies have shown its effectiveness in various conditions, in particular the prevention of depressive relapses. However, there are criticisms and concerns about its potential links to Buddhism and spirituality, raising issues of secularism and sectarianism. This issue is...
Nightmares can be defined as "an unpleasant dream with anxiety and oppression". They represent a symptom possibly leading to serious psychiatric and physical consequences. It occurs to 2% to 8% of the general population. Lucid dreaming therapy (LDT) is an interesting upcoming psychotherapy for the treatment of nightmares. The aim of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of LDT in the...
L'EncephaleAugust 19, 2023Tangui Barré, Faredj Cherikh, Patrizia Carrieri et al.
Cannabis use is being increasingly liberalized worldwide, and an increasing prevalence of cannabis-use disorder (CUD) is observed. The few current therapeutic options for CUD are only modestly effective. Mindfulness-based interventions offer promising prospects for the management of substance-use disorders. However, despite proliferating literature on mindfulness and substance use, few studies...
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), characterized by the combination of obsession and compulsion, is a clinical and therapeutic challenge. Many patients with OCD do not respond to first-line treatments such as serotonin selective reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and exposure and response prevention psychotherapy (ERP). For these resistant patients, some preliminary studies have shown that ketamine,...
L'EncephaleNovember 1, 2022J. Hulot, Jean-Baptiste Roseau, D. Gomez-Mérino et al.
INTRODUCTION Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a major public health problem. The most frequent complaints in this pathology are sleep disorders and trauma-related nightmares in particular. Trauma-related nightmares are characteristic of PTSD and impact its severity insofar as they are associated with more severe, longer-lasting symptoms and resistance to first-line treatments. There are...
The question of how the mind works is at the heart of cognitive science. It aims to understand and explain the complex processes underlying perception, decision-making and learning, three fundamental areas of cognition. Bayesian Brain Theory, a computational approach derived from the principles of Predictive Processing (PP), offers a mechanistic and mathematical formulation of these cognitive...
Ketamine, a non-competitive NMDA receptor antagonist, is used as a fast-acting antidepressant therapy in depressive disorders. This treatment provokes dissociative effects associating derealization and depersonalization, and a synaptogenic signaling cascade promoting brain plasticity. Despite several preliminary studies suggesting the usefulness of its combination with psychotherapy,...
Philosophy of Mind is currently one of the most prolific fields of research in philosophy and has witnessed a progressive hybridization with cognitive science. It focuses on fundamental questions to neuroscience and psychiatry, such as the nature of mental states and cognitive processes, or the relationships between mental states and the world. Anticipating the accumulation of experimental data...
Psychedelics are powerful psychoactive substances. Natural psychedelics have been used for millennia by human civilizations, in particular in Latin America, while synthetic psychedelics were discovered in the 50s, giving rise to a lot of research before they were prohibited. More recently, their therapeutic properties have been studied especially to help patients with psychiatric conditions,...
The hypothesis of monoaminergic deficiency has long dominated the conceptual framework for the development of new antidepressant strategies, but the limits of conventional antidepressant treatments targeting monoaminergic signaling have motivated the search for new antidepressant pathways. The success of ketamine in the management of depressive disorders has provoked a renewed interest in...
In his work « Phenomenology of Psychosis » Arthur Tatossian tends to report the basal alteration of patients to a constrained phenomenological reduction and deducts the drive of daily life as a sensitive point of the schizophrenic experience, vulnerability and mark of his destiny. This perspective reveals the challenge of the dynamics of human identity. Going beyond the spatial figure of a...
L'EncephaleApril 1, 2018H Vanhuffel, M Rey, I Lambert et al.
Insomnia is considered to be a serious public health issue affecting approximately 10% of adults. Chronic insomnia may increase the risk of health problem, psychological vulnerability and proneness to accidents. Cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) is recommended as the first line of treatment. Even though CBT-I is widely considered as an effective therapy, 20 to 30% of patients do...