Disturbances of conscious experience are central features of many psychiatric and mental health disorders. Experimental studies of conscious perception are therefore increasingly cited in clinical and translational work under the assumption that they identify neural mechanisms specific to subjective experience. Over the past decades, recording and analysis techniques have advanced substantially...
AIM Pathological dissociation is a complex clinical symptom widely observed across various psychiatric disorders. Dissociative symptoms prolong the duration of hospitalization and are associated with a poor clinical prognosis. Although several pathological models (e.g., the frontal-limbic overmodulation model and the defense cascade model) have been proposed to interpret dissociative symptoms,...
Oral ketamine has gained increasing interest beyond anesthesia, particularly for treatment-resistant depression, chronic pain, and pediatric procedural sedation. Despite expanding off-label use, there is no standardized pharmaceutical formulation, and long-term safety remains uncertain. A synthesis of evidence on safety and tolerability of the oral route is therefore needed to inform clinical...
While the relationship between bad dreams, nightmares, and brain health is a relatively new area of research, the evidence to date has been remarkably consistent. Across a range of studies, including both cross-sectional and longitudinal designs, the emerging pattern is clear: more frequent disturbing dreams (bad dreams or nightmares) are linked with poorer cognitive performance and a higher...
Distressing dreams were previously reported to predict future all‐cause dementia among predominantly white US participants aged 79–89 years, particularly in men. We investigated whether disturbing dreams (nightmares and bad dreams) were associated with all‐cause and Alzheimer dementia (AD) among individuals aged 60–89 years from diverse international regions.
Psilocybin, a classic psychedelic compound, has garnered renewed interest as a potential treatment for various psychiatric disorders. This review provides a comprehensive overview of psilocybin's history, recent clinical evidence, ongoing clinical trials, neuroimaging findings, and regulations. Historically used in spiritual and healing rituals, psilocybin was in the early 1970s subjected to...
Aim: Despite being one of the most disabling symptoms of post‐traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)—disrupting sleep continuity, reinforcing hyperarousal, and worsening psychiatric comorbidity—the physiological signature of Trauma‐related nightmares (TRNs) under naturalistic sleep conditions remains poorly characterized. Methods: We used home‐based, multi‐sensor devices from the SOMMEPT cohort to...
This study aims to investigate the acute and sustained antidepressant effects of repeated ketamine infusions in patients with treatment-resistant depression (TRD), and to identify early metabolomic changes predictive of treatment outcomes using metabolome analyses. This open-label study investigated the effects of four intravenous ketamine infusions (0.5 mg/kg) administered over 2 weeks in 30...
Although the antidepressant effect of ketamine on treatment-resistant depression (TRD) has been frequently reported in North American and European countries, evidence is scarce among the Asian population. We aimed to evaluate the efficacy and safety of intravenous ketamine in Japanese patients with TRD. In this double-blind randomized placebo-controlled trial, 34 Japanese patients with TRD were...
Psilocybin is a classic psychedelic with demonstrated preliminary clinical efficacy in a range of psychiatric disorders. Evaluating the impact of psilocybin on cognitive function is essential to unravel its potential benefits and risks. In this systematic review, we assessed psilocybin's effect on cognitive function through a comprehensive search of electronic databases from inception to...
AIM: To assess self-reported parasomnias in patients with sleep disorders and explore relationships with psychiatric illness, comorbidities, subjective sleep assessments, and polysomnographic study results. METHODS: Results from intake questionnaires and polysomnographic assessments, collected from 240 sleep centers across 30 US states between 2004 and 2019, were analyzed retrospectively. Of...
When patients seek professional help for mental disorders, they often do so because of troubling subjective affective experiences. While these subjective states are at the center of the patient's symptomatology, scientific tools for studying them and their cognitive antecedents are limited. Here, we explore the use of concepts and analytic tools from the science of consciousness, a field of...
AIM: Adolescents born very preterm (VPT; <32 weeks of gestation) face an elevated risk of executive, behavioral, and socioemotional difficulties. Evidence suggests beneficial effects of mindfulness-based intervention (MBI) on these abilities. This study seeks to investigate the association between the effects of MBI on executive, behavioral, and socioemotional functioning and reliable changes...
This study investigated the impact of an 8-month daily-guided intensive meditation-based intervention (iMI) on persistent hallucinations/delusions and health-related quality of life (QoL) in male inpatients with schizophrenia with treatment-refractory hallucinations and delusions (TRHDs). A randomized controlled trial assigned 64 male inpatients with schizophrenia and TRHD equally to an 8-month...
While conservatism bias refers to the human need for more evidence for decision‐making than rational thinking expects, the jumping to conclusions (JTC) bias refers to the need for less evidence among individuals with schizophrenia/delusion compared to healthy people. Although the hippocampus‐midbrain‐striatal aberrant salience system and the salience, default mode (DMN), and frontoparietal...
We aimed to examine the long-term benefits of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) on white matter plasticity in the cortical midline structures (CMS) for a period of 2 years in patients with panic disorder and the relationships between white matter changes in the CMS and severity of state and trait symptoms. Seventy-one participants were enrolled and underwent diffusion tensor imaging at...
Abstract The present article revisits the theoretical model of schizophrenia by Hiroshi YASUNAGA (1929–2011). Yasunaga restated ego disturbance in schizophrenia as the “Pattern Reversal” between selfhood and otherness, based on British philosopher Wauchope's concept of “pattern.” This concept is meant as asymmetrical relatedness (A/B) within a pair of concepts, such as life and death, quality...
Evidence for case–control studies suggests that cannabis use is a risk factor for the development of psychosis. However, there have been limited prospective studies and the direction of this association remains controversial. The primary aim of the present study was to examine the association between cannabis use and the incidence of psychotic disorders in people at clinical high risk of...
The primary objective of this study was to examine the effectiveness of mindfulness‐based cognitive therapy (MBCT) in secondary‐care settings where the vast majority of the patients have already undergone pharmacotherapy but have not remitted.
Major depressive disorder (MDD) is one of the most disabling psychiatric disorders. Approximately one‐third of the patients with MDD are treatment resistant to the current antidepressants. There is also a significant therapeutic time lag of weeks to months. Furthermore, depression in patients with bipolar disorder (BD) is typically poorly responsive to antidepressants. Therefore, there exists...
Growing evidence of the rapid antidepressant effects of ketamine represents a promising advance in treatment-resistant depression (TRD) therapeutics. Most studies provide information after treatment washout, reporting response up to 7 days and remission up to 3-5 days after a single dose.
The purpose of the current study was to explore the cerebral areas involved in nightmare disorder. Fifteen nightmare disorder patients and 15 healthy volunteers were invited to undergo resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging and to complete the Nightmare Experience Questionnaire. The nightmare disorder patients scored higher on the Physical Effect and Horrible Stimulation scales,...
The cross-cultural validity of dissociative possession and trance disorders is a matter of some debate, limiting research and meaningful interpretation of prevalence data. Intimate to these concerns is the status of spirit possession categories studied in the social sciences, particularly anthropology. These two categories are phenomenologically related and display similar epidemiological...
The aim of the present study was to evaluate the prevalence and characteristics of sleep paralysis in adolescents using a folk expression. Three hundred and twenty-two adolescents (mean age, 15.9 +/- 0.88 years; 66.8% female) from three high schools in Mexico City completed both a self-reported questionnaire, including a colloquial definition of sleep paralysis and the Epworth Sleepiness Scale....
Aims: The Cambridge Depersonalization Scale (CDS) is an instrument that has obtained reliability and validity in some countries for use in detecting depersonalization disorder under clinical conditions, but not yet in Japan under non‐psychiatric conditions. The purposes of this study were to develop a Japanese version of the CDS (J‐CDS) and to examine its reliability and validity as an...