Background: Police officers experience a high degree of chronic stress. Policing ranks among the highest professions in terms of disease and accident rates. Mental health is particularly impacted, evidenced by elevated rates of burnout, anxiety and depression, and poorer quality of life than the general public. Mindfulness training has been shown to reduce stress, anxiety, burnout and promote...
Therapeutic medications for the treatment of depression have serious limitations, particularly delayed onset and low rates of efficacy. However, the discovery that a single subanesthetic dose of ketamine, a glutamate NMDA receptor channel blocker, can produce a rapid (within hours) antidepressant response that is sustained (about 1 week), even in patients considered treatment-resistant, has...
Objective To investigate the relationships between mindfulness, anxiety and depression in surface warship soldiers and the mediating role of attentional control. Methods Chinese versions of State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI), Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D), Attentional Control Scale (ACS) and the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ) were used to survey 475...
The biochemical processes involved in depression go beyond serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine. The N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor has a major role in the neurophysiology of depression. Ketamine, one of the prototypical NMDA antagonists, works rapidly in controlling depressive symptoms, including acutely suicidal behavior, by just a single injection. Ketamine may rapidly increase the...
Study objectives: Although nightmares have been associated with suicidal behavior beyond well-known risk factors, the association between nightmares and multiple suicide attempts remains largely unexplored. This study addressed this gap in the literature by examining whether nightmares differentiated between individuals who reported single versus multiple suicide attempts. The individual...
Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) employs the elective induction of generalizes seizures as a potent treatment for severe psychiatric illness. As such, ECT provides an opportunity to rigorously study the recovery of consciousness, reconstitution of cognition, and electroencephalographic (EEG) activity following seizures. Fifteen patients with major depressive disorder refractory to pharmacologic...
Major depression is a highly prevalent mood disorder, affecting about 350 million people, and around 30% of the patients are resistant to currently available antidepressant medications. Recent evidence from a randomized controlled trial (RCT) supports the rapid antidepressant effects of the psychedelic ayahuasca in treatment-resistant depression. The aim of this study was to explore the effect...
If replication trials support these findings, safeguards will need to be established to guard against the risk of abuse while ensuring access to those patients who may benefit from esketamine. Intranasal esketamine appears to rapidly improve depression scores and measures of suicidality among depressed patients at imminent risk of suicide, according to a report published April 16 in AJP in...
Mindfulness interventions have been shown to be effective for health and wellbeing, and delivering mindfulness programmes online may increase accessibility and reduce waiting times and associated costs; however, research assessing the effectiveness of online interventions is lacking. We sought to: (1) assess the effects of an online mindfulness intervention on perceived stress, depression and...
The increasing prevalence of psychological distress among adolescents and young adults has been attributed to academic pressure, family conflict, socioeconomic inequalities, trauma, excessive social media use, discrimination, and other chronic stressors. When these stressors exceed an individual's coping capacity, maladaptive coping strategies such as avoidance, rumination, substance abuse,...
Growing evidence has suggested that mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) could have beneficial effects on the acute phase of depression and on the prevention of depressive relapse or recurrence. Despite growing clinical interest, the effects of MBIs on brain functioning in patients with MDD remain unclear. The aim of this systematic review was to assess the changes in brain functioning...
Psychological distress is common among patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). This study aimed to assess whether a 10-minute mindfulness intervention reduces distress and breathlessness, improves mood and increases mindfulness among hospital inpatients following acute exacerbation of COPD.Fifty patients were recruited following an acute admission. The immediate effects of a...
OBJECTIVES: Extant evidence indicates that ketamine exerts rapid antidepressant effects in treatment-resistant depressive (TRD) symptoms as a part of major depressive disorder (MDD) and bipolar disorder (BD). The identification of depressed sub-populations that are more likely to benefit from ketamine treatment remains a priority. In keeping with this view, the present narrative review aims to...
Depression and anxiety disorders are debilitating diseases resulting in substantial economic costs to society. Traditional antidepressants often take weeks to months to positively affect mood and are ineffective for about 30% of the population. Alternatives, such as ketamine, a dissociative anesthetic capable of producing hallucinations, and the psychoactive tisane ayahuasca, have shown great...
OBJECTIVE: The authors compared the efficacy of standard-of-care treatment plus intranasal esketamine or placebo for rapid reduction of symptoms of major depression, including suicidality, among individuals at imminent suicide risk. METHOD: In a double-blind, multicenter, proof-of-concept study, 68 participants were randomly assigned to receive esketamine (84 mg) or placebo twice weekly for 4...
Due to the heterogeneity of depressive symptoms-which can include depressed mood, anhedonia, negative cognitive biases, and altered activity levels-researchers often use a combination of depression rating scales to assess symptoms. This study sought to identify unidimensional constructs measured across rating scales for depression and to evaluate these constructs across clinical trials of a...
MindfulnessApril 12, 2018Birgit Mayer, Marike G. Polak, Danielle Remmerswaal
In two studies, a possible mediation effect was tested of cognitive interpretation bias in the relation between respectively dispositional mindfulness and acceptance, on the one hand, and symptoms of depression and anxiety, on the other hand. An undergraduate student sample (N = 133; 86% female, Mage = 19.8) and a convenience community sample (N = 186; 66% female, Mage = 36.5) were examined by...
BACKGROUND: The glutamatergic modulator ketamine has rapid antidepressant effects in individuals with major depressive disorder and bipolar depression. Thus, modulating glutamatergic transmission may be critical to effectively treating depression, though the mechanisms by which this occurs are not fully understood. METHODS: This double-blind, crossover, placebo-controlled study analyzed data...
Experiences of transcendence can promote growth, creativity and altruism, but often exist in tension with critical thought and can feature problematically in certain mental disorders. Identification of the core elements in the experience of transcendence-suspending disbelief, being moved or inspired, surrendering oneself and identifying within a larger context, can clarify its relationship to...