Objective It is recognised that ketamine treatment can reduce suicidal ideation (SI) in people with depression, at least in the short term. However, information is lacking on patients’ perspectives on such effects. Studying these can contribute to greater understanding of the mechanisms underlying impact of ketamine treatment on SI. The aim of this study was to investigate patients’ reports of...
This article first describes Sufism, the mystical/spiritual tradition of Islam then move to define Islamic psychotherapy and the various aspects of muraqaba by providing an overview of the Sufi literature. I will also highlight how the techniques used in muraqaba can be adapted and used as mindfulness-based stress reduction, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, meditation, transcendental...
Background: People who suffer a first episode of psychosis experience higher levels of distress and suffering. Early intervention programs combine pharmacological and psychosocial strategies that include different components, such as cognitive-behavioural therapy, psychosocial interventions, medication adherence, family psychoeducation, counselling, etc. Among the complementary approaches,...
Increasing neuroimaging evidence suggests that mindfulness meditation expertise is related to different functional and structural configurations of the default mode network (DMN), the salience network (SN) and the executive network at rest. However, longitudinal studies observing resting network plasticity effects in brains of novices who started to practice meditation are scarce and generally...
Ketamine has become increasingly popular in adolescent drug abusers worldwide. Meanwhile, alcohol is usually used by ketamine users. However, little work has been conducted to examine the chronic combined effects of ketamine and ethanol on adolescent brain. Here we probed into the effects of chronic administration of ketamine at recreational doses alone or combined with ethanol on behaviors and...
This paper continues the cycle of interdisciplinary studies that feature a new technology of audiovisual induction of altered states of consciousness. The technology is based on a combination of models, methods, and approaches of psychology, mathematics, and computer science. The research objective was to prove that the technology can induce relaxation states. The authors conducted two...
This article covers the renaissance of classical psychedelic drugs such as psilocybin and LSD plus 3,4-methylene dioxymethamphetamine (MDMA-ecstasy) in psychiatric research. These drugs were used quite extensively before they became prohibited. This ban had little impact on recreational use, but effectively stopped research and clinical treatments, which up to that point had looked very...
This study examined mood enhancement effects from 4-week focusing attention (FA) meditation and 4-week open monitoring (OM) meditation in an 8-week mindfulness training program designed for ordinary individuals. Forty participants were randomly assigned to a training group or a control group. All participants were asked to perform cognitive tasks and subjective scale tests at three time points...
The benefits of mindfulness for a variety of clinical and nonclinical populations are well established and there is growing interest in the potential of mindfulness in higher education. This article reports on the results from a randomized wait-list controlled study of Mindfulness-Based Coping With University Life (MBCUL), an adaption of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) for university...
BACKGROUND. Police officers are exposed daily to high levels of organizational and operational stressors that have a negative impact on health and well-being outcomes. This population has elevated rates of cardiovascular disease, sleep disorders, symptoms of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and suicide. Although there are few empirically supported effective stress reduction...