The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.

Psychosocial interventions are an essential part of the treatment of schizophrenia and are aimed at promoting the social, family and occupational functioning of the patient and relapse prevention. They are considered proven clinical measures whenever necessary, however they tend to be underused.

Answer the question on psychosocial therapies available today for schizophrenia.

Review through PubMed by entering the following keywords: psychosocial therapy; schizophrenia; cognitive behavioral therapy, and clinical practice guidelines.

There are several psychosocial therapies used in clinical practice. The main points of approach focus on self-management of the disease, everyday problems, education, crisis intervention, and acquiring insight. The cognitive impairment is an important aspect of schizophrenia to consider. It seems that cognitive remediation therapy has been associated with both neurobiological and cognitive improvement.

The combination of different therapies along with psychopharmacological treatment appears to provide better results in the reduction of negative symptoms, positive symptoms and reduced hospital stay.

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.

Involuntary admissions continue to be a controversial topic in psychiatry. However, it is well known that psychosocial rehabilitation treatment is more successful when the patient is involved in it improving awareness and adherence to treatment.

This study examined admissions patterns, including voluntary, involuntary, and partly voluntary admissions to a subacute psychiatric hospital.

This is a transversal study. All patients admitted for a medium-term psychiatric treatment since 01/06/2014 to 30/11/2015 were included. Patients's basic sociodemographic and clinical data were collected and compiled in a database. Descriptive statistics were performed using SPSS Software.

A total of 88 patients (52% men; mean age: 48.6 years) composed the sample. In 58% of cases, schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder were the diagnoses motivating the admission. Among 88 patients, 44 (50%) had voluntary admissions, 16 (18.2%) had involuntary admissions, 27 (30.7%) had partly voluntary admissions and just one patient (1.1%) had partly involuntary admissions. Seventy-one (80.1%) patients had voluntary admissions at discharge, and only one of them escape from hospital and did not finish the treatment.

In the short term involuntary hospitalization has benefits, however also can have adverse long-term consequences for the patient-therapist allegiance, breaking the psychotherapeutic relationship and making the patient abandon treatment. It's important to reassess the condition of admission and work with the patient the need to engage in treatment.

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.

The elapsed time since a patients’ disease is diagnosed till these patients come to rehabilitation centers is usually long. In this study in our sanitary area, we have checked the average length of time since the patient is diagnosed till they come to the rehabilitation center.

To calculate and analyze the years of evolution of the disease in patients who come to the rehabilitation center in the Talavera area during year 2014. Classify them by sex.

Retrospective cross-sectional descriptive study. We carried out a register of all the patients who come to the Psychosocial and labor Rehabilitation center in 2014. Classified them by sex, and the time lapsed since they were diagnosed until 2014.

From all 135 patients: 92 men (68.15%) and 43 women (31.85%). Less than 2 years of evolution: 1 patient (1%) 1 men, 0 women; between 2 and 5 years of evolution: 7 patients (5%) 5 men, 2 women; between 6 and 10 years evolution: 13 patients (10%) 7 men, 6 women; more than 10 years: 114 patients (84%).

It is evident that the number of patients increases proportionally to the number of years since the diagnosis. The majority of patients who come to the center (84%) were diagnosed more than 10 years ago. This leads us to wonder why the patients in our sanitary area with recent diagnosis of diseases such as schizophrenia do not come to the mentioned centers earlier.

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.

People with schizophrenia exhibit deficits in neurocognitive and social cognitive (SC) processes which limit their social reintegration. SC was found to mediate in part the impact of neurocognitive dysfunctions on real-life functioning.

The purpose of this study was to implement a new intervention for patients with schizophrenia, the Social Cognition Individualized Activities Lab (So.C.I.A.L.) which trains both social cognition and neurocognitive functions.

To determine the efficacy of the So.C.I.A.L in improving SC by a comparison with a validated cognitive remediation (CR) intervention: the Social Skills And Neurocognitive Individualized Training (SSANIT).

Nine stabilized patients accepted to participate in this pilot study. Five were randomized to So.C.I.A.L. and 4 to SSANIT. The two programs were matched for the overall treatment duration (20 weeks), as well as frequency and duration of the sessions. Both interventions included individual sessions of neurocognitive individualized training; So.C.I.A.L included group sessions on Emotion Recognition and Theory of Mind, while SSANIT group sessions of Social Skills Individualized Training.

No group difference was found for changes in neurocognition, while a significant group effect was observed for changes in SC, due to improvement only in the So.C.I.A.L. group.

The study results showed a specific effect of the So.C.I.A.L. on SC, beyond the effect on neurocognition. Further studies are needed to assess the impact of So.C.I.A.L. on real-life functioning in a larger group of subjects.

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.

Case management (CM) is accepted as the most recommended approach for the treatment of people with severe mental illnesses (SMI) in Community Mental Health Centers (CMHC) in whole Bosnia and Herzegovina (BH) in the last 3 years.

All team members of CMHC Prijedor are certificated case managers. Part of our daily activities is work with and for the users included in CM (mostly with schizophrenia or similar disorders) using multidisciplinary approach to find best possible solutions of both treatment and rehabilitation for users that we are in charge. In this moment CMHC cares for 12 mostly younger users involved in the CM.

To show advantages as well as obstacles of the CM.

Case study of young user with schizoaffective disorder included in the CM in the last 2 years.

Improvements in user's daily activities and using of the remaining capacities with confrontation of partial or entire poor responses of most other community services.

CM has many advantages for the user involved in it, mostly medical and psychological (adequate treatment followed by users wishes, avoidance of hospitalization, improving existing or building new skills, use of remaining capacities, planed activities, minimize of the psychopharmacological treatment, social skills and more new contacts with people, etc.). But, still are existing the obstacles in the community mostly considering employment and social care as an part of the stigmatization of the people with SMI.

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.

Crisis prevention and management of the psychiatric patient have obtained a central role in the policies of Mental Health Services. In this context, Mental Health Centre of Ravenna has launched a “Crisis Center”, a rehabilitation group project applied to three types of users: users in an early stage of crisis, users in a post-critical stage and users at high risk of crisis. Intervention was based on the Illness Management and Recovery practice, an evidence-based program which consists in social skills training activities, emotions management, symptom management, coping skills training, psycho-education and, more generally, supporting users in their personal recovery process.

Objectives of this project is to prevent crisis and hospitalization and to provide an alternative to institutionalization for mental health users.

The aims of this study was to analyze and show effects and results of the project, in its first three years of life.

Through the database “Infoclin”, we analyzed data of 94 users who took part in the project between January 2012 and December 2014.

Analysis showed, primarily, that out of 94 users, 64 (68%) have not needed hospitalization in the following two years after intervention. Furthermore, out of 39 users with a history of one or more hospitalizations at time of entry, 22 (56.4%) have not needed hospitalization in the next two years.

Despite the low number of users analyzed, it is believed that this study should be considered a further evidence of the positive effects of the IMR practice within mental health services.

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.

The author has not supplied his/her declaration of competing interest.

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.

In psychiatric practice, the assessment of change from pre- to post-treatment is a key approach for monitoring treatment effects and for the prediction of treatment outcomes. The Health of the Nation Outcome Scales (HoNOS) as a clinician-rated measure and the Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI) as a self-report measure are tools (that are) often incorporated in outcome monitoring. Their usefulness, however, has been questioned by two important issues: their psychometric properties and their lack of concordance.

The aim of the study is to evaluate the responsiveness of HoNOS and BSI as well as their interactions to predict clinical meaningful change according to the Global Clinical Impression (CGI) as quasi-gold standard for treatment outcome.

A consecutive sample of patients admitted to a Swiss psychiatric hospital for either alcohol use disorders, schizophrenic psychoses, mood disorders, anxiety and somatoform disorders, or personality disorders was assessed with Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI) at admission and discharge. The HoNOS and the CGI were rated by the responsible clinicians at admission and discharge. Ordinal logistic regressions will be conducted using the CGI categories as ordered categorical outcome. HoNOS and BSI scores as well as their interaction terms will be used as independent variables.

Complete data of admission and discharge is available from approximately 600 cases. Graphical presentations will illustrate the resulting associations.

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.

We currently lack clinical guidelines for the treatment of Delusional Disorder (DD) F-22, the low prevalence of the disease coupled with no awareness of illness and poor adherence to prescribed treatment make it difficult to study. The limited evidence available for the treatment is based mainly on clinical series.

This study evaluates the knowledge and preferences in the treatment of the DD, in order to improve clinical practice and gain information of the DD to conduct clinical studies of effectiveness of the different treatments.

A self-administered survey was conducted on a sample of 80 psychiatrists proceeding on a wide array of mental health care services. Participants provided socio-demographic data and information about clinical details, together with their opinions regarding the, epidemiological aspects, clinical management, diagnosis and therapy. Descriptive statistics were subsequently calculated with SPSS.

Most of our sample's of Psychiatrists estimated that the DD prevalence was higher than the one previously established. Ninety-three percent of the sample considered the SGAs as the first treatment option in DD, being Aripiprazol 20.7%, Risperidone 17.4% and Paliperidone 15% the first line treatment chosen by our Psychiatrists.

There is an increasing gap between the old standard DD treatment and the clinical practice of Andalusian Psychiatrists, for this reason we emphasize the need of implementing clinical trials and effectiveness clinical studies.

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.

Delusional Disorder (DD) F22 is a disease with low prevalence, probably underdiagnosed by clinical specialists due to the high level of functionality, low awareness of disease, low deterioration of patients and poor adherence to prescribed treatment. Adherence to treatment is considered to be one of the major difficulties that stand in the way of the treatment of DD. The present paper assessed psychiatrists’ opinion of the adherence to treatment of patients with DD.

A self-administered survey was conducted on a sample of psychiatrists proceeding on a wide array of mental health care services. Participants provided their opinions regarding adherence to treatment. Descriptive statistics were subsequently calculated with SPSS.

In the opinion of our participants none of the patients have an active compliance of the treatment, 36% consider that the participation is partial or passive. It is also estimated that 57.5% reject the treatment but not totally and 6.5% believe that rejection is absolute.

Literature informs of the association of poor adherence to treatment and little or no improvement of patients, suggesting the need to address the lack of compliance and adherence to treatment as a crucial aspect to improve the prognosis of DD. To address this problem Long Acting Injections (LAIs) of Atypical Antipsychotics are postulated to be a plausible solution as a good treatment strategy. In order to improve the clinical practice in DD and obtain information for further effectiveness we emphasize the need of implementing clinical studies.

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.

In the framework of the development of the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health Core Set for schizophrenia, we conducted a cross-sectional, internet-based survey using open-ended questions. An international pool of experts from diverse health care disciplines was surveyed to identify problems in functioning experienced by individuals with schizophrenia.

The purpose of the study is to explore possible associations between experts’ socio-demographic and professional profiles, and whether they answered or not the survey.

Out of 307 invited experts, 189 (61.56%) filled in the survey. However, 37 experts were excluded in the data analysis as they had completed only a part of the questionnaire. Thus, there were 152 of the experts classified as “respondents” and the remaining 155 as “non-respondents”. The association between the response pattern and the socio-demographic and professional variables (i.e., gender, World Health Organization region, discipline, and years of experience) was analysed by means of Chi2 tests.

There was a statistically significant association between the response pattern and the gender of the expert (χ2(1) = 4.927, P = 0.026; V = 0.127), showing that 56.3% of female and 43.6% of male experts answered the survey. When comparing the response pattern in terms of discipline, a statistically significant association was also found (χ2(4) = 10.101, P = 0.039; V = 0.183), showing that those who tend to answer the survey are occupational therapists (71.4%), followed by psychologists (58.0%), social workers (52.6%), nurses (52.0%), and psychiatrists (41.3%).

Females and occupational therapists presented the higher response rate to the expert survey.

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.

The author has not supplied his/her declaration of competing interest.

Mindfulness refers to the capacity of being present and aware, without feeling the need to react or judge that experience (Kabat Zinn, 1990). This ability is associated with mental health and stress reduction (Baer, 2014; Teasdale et al., 2014). Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ) is widely used to measure mindfulness and its relation to psychopathology (Gregorio and Gouveia, 2011).

To analyze the psychometric properties of the Portuguese 15 items FFMQ (Baer; Gregório et al., authors’ manuscript) in a Portuguese sample of pregnant women.

A total of 427 pregnant women (Mean age: 32.56 ± 4.785 years) in their second trimester of pregnancy (17.34 ± 4.790 weeks of gestation) completed the Portuguese version of FFMQ-15.

The FFMQ-15 Cronbach's alpha was unsatisfactory (α = 0.62) and five items presented low (< 0.20) correlations and had the effect of increasing Cronbach alpha if removed. Without these items, α increased to a satisfactory level (0.72) and all the ten items contributed to internal consistency. The factorial analysis of these ten items resulted in a three factors solution, which explained variance (EV) was of 53.9%. Based on items content, the meaningful three factors were denominated as follows: F1 Nonjudging of experience (EV 27.69%; α = 0.77), F2 Acting with awareness (18.00%; α = 0.77) and F3 Observing and describing (8.21%; α = 0.73).

Although the FFMQ-15 has shown good psychometric properties in other samples, in this sample of pregnant women a 10-items FMQ (Facets of Mindfulness Questionnaire) version performed better, presenting good reliability and validity in evaluating three mindfulness facets.

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.

Emotion regulation (ER) efficiency dwells among the most pressing issues of contemporary psychology and psychiatry. Further development of the methods of reliable assessments for ER makes it the task of current importance.

To modify Rosenzweig Picture-Frustration Test for the study of ER in health and in disease.

In the initial stage of testing participants had to look through a succession of Rosenzweig's pictures, and select potentially traumatizing situations.

In the second stage they answered the following questions:

• – what would you say in this particular situation?

• – what would you have in mind, saying this?

• – could you think of an answer that would taper down the traumatizing character of the situation in your own perception? (Zinchenko, Pervichko, 2014).

A total of 85 patients with stress-induced hypertension (mean age was 45.9 ± 2.8) and 82 healthy subjects (mean age was 44.9 ± 3.1) took part in the study.

We came to distinguish among four classes of ER strategies: internal, cognitively non-mediated; internal, cognitively transforming; external, cognitively non-mediated; and external, cognitively transforming (Pervichko, 2015). Hypertensive patients significantly more frequently than healthy subjects reveal wider set of emotionally grave events (19.8% vs 11.2%, P < 0.001), they are more prone to rumination, disasterization (19.0% vs 11.1%, P < 0.001) and suppression in display of their emotions (31.9% vs 20.2%, P < 0.001). The patients will seldom employ the strategy of interactive subject–subject transformations; their capability to actualize new meanings in traumatic situations is diminished.

Application of the described modification of Rosenzweig Picture-Frustration Test allows to distinguish and classify various ER strategies, and to demonstrate peculiarities in ER related behaviour of hypertensive patients as opposed to healthy subjects.

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.

New psychoactive substances (NPS) are substances that have recently become available, and are not worldwide regulated. They often intend to mimic the effect of controlled drugs, becoming a public health concern. In 2014, 101 substances were reported for the first time in the EU, which may require to be studied and risk-assessed by the scientific community. The EMCDDA recognizes it as an emerging topic where research is most needed, as the scientific community is struggling to keep pace with the speed at which new substances appear. On the one hand, case reports and internet-based surveys are quickly published but do not provide enough evidence to guide clinical decisions. On the other hand, classical high-reliability methodologies such as Cohort and Clinical studies take too long and their cost is too high to be of much use for the study of NPS. We propose an intermediate methodology to tackle this unmet need.

González and colleagues described a set of highly educated, experimental users of NPS with extensive knowledge and consumption of substances. These users usually look for drug checking of the substances they intend to consume. We suggest we could benefit from the collaboration of such users, and the possibility of obtaining analytical confirmation, to retrieve information about NPS in a quick and reliable fashion.

Recluting of subjects that submit NPS to a drug checking facility. Analysis of the samples for analytical confirmation. Check inclusion criteria and propose inclusion in the study. Give structured forms for reporting effects and adverse events.

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.

Risperidone-ISM is a new long-acting intramuscular formulation intended to achieve sustained plasma concentrations over 4 weeks without oral supplementation. The clinical efficacy to risperidone has been associated with 65–80% occupancy of dopamine D2 receptor (D2RO) and a mean Cmax between 7.5 ng/mL and 80 ng/mL.

Use a population PK/PD model to predict the PK and the D2RO for Risperidone-ISM in schizophrenic patients and to characterize the relationship among doses, in order to guide dose selection for a future Phase-III trial.

A population PK/PD analysis for Risperidone-ISM using Monolix software was conducted based on 6641 plasma samples from two Phase-I studies (17 healthy subjects and 31 schizophrenic subjects, respectively) and 1 Phase-II study (60 schizophrenic subjects). Simulations were subsequently undertaken predicting the steady state PK and D2RO after multiple Risperidone-ISM doses administered every 28 days for 12 weeks.

Doses of 75 and 100 mg, administered either in gluteal or deltoid muscle, were predicted to result in median Cmax and Ctrough that stayed between 7.5 ng/mL and 80 ng/mL. At steady state 75 mg and 100 mg dose (gluteal) achieved a D2RO average [min–max] of 70.8% [61.4–80.4] and 74.3% [66.2–82.1], respectively; a 75-mg and 100-mg dose (deltoid) achieved a D2RO average [min–max] of 69.3% [56.5–80.3] and 73.0% [61.8–82.1], respectively. The model estimated that the 65% D2RO occurs within first 8 h after treatment.

Simulations were carried out supporting doses of 75 mg and 100 mg Risperidone-ISM to show the greatest efficacy and safety potential to be assessed in the future Phase-III trial.

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.