Type D personality impairs quality of life, coping and short-term psychological outcome in patients attending an outpatient intensive program of cardiac rehabilitation.

Background: Type D personality represents a risk factor for adverse outcome and impaired Quality of Life (QoL) in CHD patients. Only few studies investigated Type D patients following cardiac rehabilitation (CR). No study investigated Type D personality in Italian patients attending a CR program of 4 weeks.

Psychoanalysis and art: artistic representations in patients' dreams.

The authors explore the psychic passages that were opened up within a patient, Ada, thanks to her contact with two works of art, Signorelli's frescoes in Orvieto and Picasso's painting La Nageuse--their themes, formal structures, and the conventions governing their creation. A work of art can be considered as a kind of window that allows one to look upon the imaginary world created by the artist. One can peer out of this window from the other side, permitting a look at the viewer (the patient), who is caught in a web of associations that are yet to be explored.

Recurrent renal colic in young people: abdominal Munchausen syndrome--a diagnosis not to forget.

The Munchausen's syndrome (MHS) is a rare psychiatric disorder classified among the self-manipulated diseases. Incidence of Munchausen syndrome peaks in young-to-middle-aged adults, but it has been reported in patients of all ages (ie, childhood through advanced age). Diagnosing Munchausen syndrome is very difficult, but early diagnosis could to a considerable extent prevent the iatrogenic risks.

Social anxiety and premorbid personality disorders in paranoid schizophrenic patients treated with clozapine.

The concept of anxiety as a distinct comorbid disorder in schizophrenia has recently been rediscovered after having been neglected for a long period of time due to both theoretical and clinical approaches adopted from the appearance of the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1950. This rediscovery was accentuated by the fact that the concept of comorbidity in various psychiatric disorders has recently won widespread favor within the scientific community, and that the use of atypical neuroleptic medication to treat patients with schizophrenia has been reported to lead to the emergence of anxiety symptoms. Of the atypical neuroleptic medications used to treat schizophrenia, clozapine has most frequently been reported to induce anxiety symptoms.

Delusion, narrative, and affects.

Delusions and narrations have very different communicative characteristics. Delusion, when reported, places itself outside of a shared communication, of an interactive field; it is presented as an absolute, non-modifiable, saturated truth, that can only be believed or refuted. A clinical vignette is an example on the possibility that psychoanalytic treatments might be sometime able to at least partly transform a delusion into an account narrated in an interactive situation.