Aims: A variety of pharmacotherapies have been used to assist the psychotherapy process as “adjunctive therapies.” These drugs are used in an acute, targeted fashion, such that they are explicitly delivered in the context of psychotherapy for anxiety, mood and substance-dependence disorders (SUDs). Our narrative review highlights the potential of medically-assisted psychotherapy by outlining...
Lilliputian hallucinations concern hallucinated human, animal or fantasy entities of minute size. Having been famously described by the French psychiatrist Raoul Leroy in 1909, who wrote from personal experience, to date they are mentioned almost routinely in textbooks of psychiatry, albeit with little in-depth knowledge. I therefore systematically reviewed 145 case reports and case series...
A key goal of consciousness science is identifying neural signatures of being aware versus unaware of simple stimuli. This is often investigated in the context of near-threshold detection, with reports of stimulus awareness being linked to heightened activation in a frontoparietal network. However, because of reports of stimulus presence typically being associated with higher confidence than...
Survivors of childhood maltreatment are at high risk for developing complex psychiatric disorders. Traditional treatments, including psychopharmacology, tend to be less efficacious for this population. This scoping review aimed to discuss existing empirical studies on the effects of mindfulness-based interventions for adult childhood trauma survivors, as well as the documented clinical...
Envisioning the future of sleep medicine begins with an examination of the limitations imposed by our presumptions about sleep itself. Damaged by the overarching sociocultural forces of denaturation, industrialization, and medicalization, the tenets of integrative medicine provide a foundation for imagining a radically transformed sense of sleep and more effective approaches to managing sleep...
NeuroimageJune 1, 2021Yi-Xuan Feng, Ren-Yuan Li, Wei Wei et al.
Volitional eye closure is observed only in conscious and awake humans, and is rare in animals. It is believed that eye closure can focus one's attention inward and facilitate activities such as meditation and mental imagery. Congenital blind individuals are also required to close their eyes for these activities. Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (RS-fMRI) studies have found...
AimsThis study examines what effect wilderness has on our conscious awareness, and by extension of that meta-cognition; our physical, mental and spiritual health. It reviews available scientific and artistic literature and integrates this with interviews in order to generate original grounded theory. It was found that intensity of wilderness experience varied proportionally with four mediators;...
In the 1950s, psychedelic drugs were the subject of extensive psychiatric research in the United States. By 1960, they had been found to be non-addictive, to have remarkable safety profiles, and to potentially be able to treat a range of psychological conditions. However, in 1968, the possession of psychedelics was criminalized by the US federal government. Consequently, medical research has...
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) presents a major public health problem for which currently available treatments are modestly effective. We report the findings of a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, multi-site phase 3 clinical trial (NCT03537014) to test the efficacy and safety of 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA)-assisted therapy for the treatment of patients with...
In his paper "Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science," Andy Clark seminally proposed that the brain's job is to predict whatever information is coming "next" on the basis of prior inputs and experiences. Perception fundamentally subserves survival and self-preservation in biological agents, such as humans. Survival however crucially depends on...