Publications by authors named "Mauricio Alvarez-Monjaras"

Objective: This cross-sectional study investigates the characteristics and practices of mental health care services implementing Open Dialogue (OD) globally.

Methods: A structured questionnaire including a self-assessment scale to measure teams' adherence to Open Dialogue principles was developed. Data were collected from OD teams in various countries.

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Unlabelled: Open dialogue (OD) is a multi-component therapeutic and organizational intervention for crisis and continuing community mental health care with a therapeutic focus on clients' social networks. The development and implementation of this model of care in the United Kingdom requires considerable contextual adaptations which need to be assessed to support effective implementation. Program fidelity-the extent to which core components of an intervention are delivered as intended by an intervention protocol at all levels-is crucial for these adaptations.

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Introduction: Open dialog (OD) is a both a therapeutic practice and a service delivery model that offers an integrated response to mental health care through mobilizing resources within the service user's family and community networks through joint network meetings. Therapist adherence is a crucial to the effective delivery of interventions. A key way to measure this is through structured observation tools.

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Article Synopsis
  • The global use of psychosocial and psychiatric care has grown, with a focus on understanding psychiatrization—processes that spread psychiatric ideas and treatments.
  • The Open Dialogue (OD) approach could offer alternative, less psychiatrizing support, potentially reducing neuroleptic use, mental health issues, and reliance on psychiatric services.
  • The paper emphasizes the importance of OD's unique principles and warns against its potential misuse, advocating for increased societal skills in managing psychosocial crises.
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Article Synopsis
  • The study investigates how reflective functioning affects the relationship between mothers' perceptions of caregiving and their parenting sensitivity, specifically in a group of 142 substance-abusing mothers and their toddlers.
  • Results show that better mental representations of caregiving lead to higher maternal sensitivity, and this connection is significantly influenced by reflective functioning.
  • The findings highlight the importance of reflective functioning in parenting for mothers with substance abuse issues and suggest that attachment-based interventions could be beneficial for this vulnerable group.
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Although substance use and abuse may impact brain and behavior, it is still unclear why some people become addicted while others do not. Neuroscientific theories explain addiction as a series of between- and within-system neuroadaptations that lead to an increasingly dysregulating cycle, affecting reward, motivation, and executive control systems. In contrast, psychoanalysis understands addiction through a relational perspective wherein there is an underlying failure in affect regulation, a capacity shaped early developmentally.

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