The effect of legal representation on clinical measures in involuntarily admitted psychiatric patients: a retrospective study.

Background: Most western countries provide funded legal representation (LR) for involuntarily admitted psychiatric patients appearing before judicial committees. In 2004, an amendment to the Israeli Mental Health Act granted this right to involuntarily committed psychiatric patients. Psychiatrists then voiced concerns that LR may increase rates of premature discharge and compromise patients' safety and well-being.

Prenatal cannabis exposure and the risk for neuropsychiatric anomalies in the offspring: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

Objective: To evaluate the association between cannabis use during pregnancy and the risk for long-term neuropsychiatric pathology in the offspring.

Data Sources: MEDLINE, EMBASE, and Cochrane library databases were systematically searched until January 22, 2024, with no language or date restrictions.

Study Eligibility Criteria: Studies were eligible for inclusion if they reported quantitative data on any long-term neuropsychiatric outcome in offspring whose mothers used cannabis during pregnancy for medical or recreational use, by any route and at any trimester, in comparison to offspring of women who abstained from cannabis use during pregnancy.

Characterization of Cannabis users and products and the experience of negative mental emotions following Cannabis use.

There is a potential link between cannabis and mental disorders. Cannabis exposure involves in many cases negative mental emotions, which are unpleasant sensations or thoughts. Whereas mild cases of negative mental emotions inflict patient's quality of life, more severe cases lead to therapy discontinuations, or even hospitalizations and death.

Psychiatric referrals to the general hospital emergency department: are we being effective?

Introduction: General hospital emergency departments (GHEDs) are notoriously overcrowded. This is caused, in part, by ineffective referrals, that is to say referrals that do not require medical examination or other interventions in the context of a general hospital. This study aims to investigate the contribution of psychiatric referrals to this issue, to identify potential determinants of these referrals and offer means to reduce them.

Computer vision-based algorithm to sUppoRt coRrect electrode placemeNT (CURRENT) for home-based electric non-invasive brain stimulation.

Objective: Home-based non-invasive brain stimulation (NIBS) has been suggested as an adjunct treatment strategy for neuro-psychiatric disorders. There are currently no available solutions to direct and monitor correct placement of the stimulation electrodes. To address this issue, we propose an easy-to-use digital tool to support patients for self-application.

Less inhibited and more depressed? The puzzling association between mood, inhibitory control and depressive symptoms.

Background: Inhibitory control (IC) deficits have been proposed as a potential risk factor for depression. However, little is known about the intra-individual daily fluctuations in IC, and its relationship to mood and depressive symptoms. Here, we examined the everyday association between IC and mood, in typical adults with various levels of depressive symptoms.

Aberrant Intrinsic Brain Network Functional Connectivity During a Face-Matching Task in Women Diagnosed With Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder.

Background: Premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) is characterized by affective, cognitive, and physical symptoms, suggesting alterations at the brain network level. Women with PMDD demonstrate aberrant discrimination of facial emotions during the luteal phase of the menstrual cycle and altered reactivity to emotional stimuli. However, previous studies assessing emotional task-related brain reactivity using region-of-interest or whole-brain analysis have reported conflicting findings.

Brain activation in individuals suffering from bulimia nervosa and control subjects during sweet and sour taste stimuli.

Introduction: Episodes of eating great quantities of extremely sweet and often aversive tasting food are a hallmark of bulimia nervosa. This unique eating pattern led researchers to seek and find differences in taste perception between patients and healthy control subjects. However, it is currently not known if these originate from central or peripheral impairment in the taste perception system.

Examining the synergistic effects of a cognitive control video game and a home-based, self-administered non-invasive brain stimulation on alleviating depression: the DiSCoVeR trial protocol.

Enhanced behavioral interventions are gaining increasing interest as innovative treatment strategies for major depressive disorder (MDD). In this study protocol, we propose to examine the synergistic effects of a self-administered home-treatment, encompassing transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) along with a video game based training of attentional control. The study is designed as a two-arm, double-blind, randomized and placebo-controlled multi-center trial (ClinicalTrials.

Neural oscillations while remembering traumatic memories in post-traumatic stress disorder.

Objective: The current study investigated the oscillatory brain activity of PTSD patients during directed and imaginal exposure to the traumatic memory using magnetoencephalography (MEG), in a paradigm resembling exposure therapy.

Methods: Brain activity of healthy trauma-exposed controls and PTSD participants was measured with MEG as they listened to individualized trauma narratives as well as to a neutral narrative and as they imagined the narrative in detail. Source localization analysis by frequency bands was conducted in order to map neural generators of oscillatory activity.

Pilot Study of the Cognitive-Functional Intervention for Adults (Cog-Fun A): A Metacognitive-Functional Tool for Adults With Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

Importance: Adults with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) often experience chronic challenges in their life roles. There is a need for evidence-based occupational therapy interventions to help enhance their functioning.

Objective: To determine the preliminary effectiveness of the Cognitive-Functional Intervention for Adults (Cog-Fun A), a metacognitive-functional occupational therapy tool for the improvement of occupational performance (OP) and quality of life (QoL) in adults with ADHD.

The association between implicit and explicit affective inhibitory control, rumination and depressive symptoms.

Inhibitory control underlies one's ability to maintain goal-directed behavior by inhibiting prepotent responses or ignoring irrelevant information. Recent models suggest that impaired inhibition of negative information may contribute to depressive symptoms, and that this association is mediated by rumination. However, the exact nature of this association, particularly in non-clinical samples, is unclear.

The imprint of childhood adversity on emotional processing in high functioning young adults.

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) have been acknowledged as risk factors for increased mental health complications in adulthood, specifically increasing susceptibility to developing psychopathology upon exposure to trauma. Yet, little is known regarding the impact of mild ACEs on highly functioning population. In this study forty participants were selected from a group of 366 highly selected military parachute trainees using the self-report "childhood trauma questionnaire," and classified into two groups of 20 each, with and without ACEs.

Trait-related changes in brain network topology in premenstrual dysphoric disorder.

The female predominance in the prevalence of depression is partially accounted by reactivity to hormonal fluctuations. Premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) is a reproductive subtype of depression characterized by cyclic emotional and somatic symptoms that recur before menstruation. Despite the growing understanding that most psychiatric disorders arise from dysfunctions in distributed brain circuits, the brain's functional connectome and its network properties of segregation and integration were not investigated in PMDD.

Sex differences during emotion processing are dependent on the menstrual cycle phase.

Sex differences in the neural processing of emotion are of special interest considering that mood and anxiety disorders predominant in females. However, these sex-related differences were typically studied without considering the hormonal status of female subjects, although emotion processing in the brain was shown to differ between phases of the menstrual cycle. In this functional MRI study, we demonstrated the influence of the menstrual cycle phase on sex differences in brain activity and functional connectivity during negative and positive emotions, using two different paradigms: emotion perception and emotion experience.

Altered cerebral benzodiazepine receptor binding in post-traumatic stress disorder.

Agonists of the γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) type A benzodiazepine (BZD) receptor exert anxiolytic effects in anxiety disorders, raising the possibility that altered GABA-ergic function may play a role in the pathophysiology of anxiety disorders, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). However, few neuroimaging studies have assessed the function or binding potential of the central GABA BZD receptor system in PTSD. Therefore, our aim was to compare the BZD receptor binding potential between PTSD patients and healthy controls.

Delusional Parasitosis: Diagnosis and Treatment.

Delusional parasitosis (DP) is a somatic type of delusional disorder, usually mono-symptomatic, in which the patients are convinced they are being infested with animal parasites while no objective evidence exists to support this belief. The complaints are usually about skin infestation, but involvement of the gastrointestinal tract has also been described. Numerous samples are brought for examination from skin, clothes, and environmental sources, while a detailed description of the "parasite" is given.

Anorexia Nervosa, Selflessness, and Gender-role Identity: A Study of Daughters and Parents.

Background: This study examines the relationship between anorexia nervosa (AN), selflessness, and genderrole identity in young Israeli women and explores their parents' gender-role identity.

Method: Forty-seven AN women and 50 non-clinical controls completed the Eating Attitudes Test (EAT26), Eating Disorder Inventory (EDI-2), Bem Sex-Role Inventory (BSRI), and Selflessness Scale. Twenty-four parents from the AN group, and 41 mothers and 38 fathers from the control group also completed the BSRI.

Selflessness as a predictor of remission from an eating disorder: 1-4 year outcomes from an adolescent day-care unit.

Objective: To assess the potential role of selflessness in predicting remission from an eating disorder (ED) following discharge from an adolescent day-care unit.

Method: Participants were 95 female patients (aged 13-19 years) with an ED diagnosis across the spectrum admitted to an adolescent day-care unit for EDs between 2008 and 2012. Forty-one of these participants completed the follow-up assessment, between 12 and 46 months following discharge.

Oscillatory brain mechanisms of the hypnotically-induced out-of-body experience.

One of the most challenging questions regarding the nature and neural basis of consciousness is the embodied dimension of the phenomenon, that is, feeling located within the body and viewing the world from that spatial perspective. Current theories in neurophysiology highlight the active role of multisensory and sensorimotor integration in supporting self-location and self-perspective, and propose the right temporal-parietal-junction (rTPJ) as a key area for such function. These theories are based mainly on findings from two experimental paradigms: manipulation of bottom-up multisensory information integration regarding one's body location (full-body illusion), or direct and invasive manipulation disrupting brain activity at the rTPJ.

Weight Trajectories of Israeli Pediatric Cancer Survivors.

Objective: Cross-national replication of the high rates of overweight/obesity among U.S. pediatric cancer survivors (PCS) is limited.

The Efficacy of Computerized Cognitive Training in Adults With ADHD: A Randomized Controlled Trial.

Objective: This is a randomized control trial examining the efficiency of computerized cognitive training (CCT) for adults with ADHD, comparing two training conditions with graded levels of executive cognitive demands.

Method: Adults with ADHD (n = 60) were randomized into study (n = 34) and control (n = 26) groups. Training was conducted with the computerized AttenFocus program.