[Closing forensic psychiatric hospitals in Italy: a new deal for mental health care?].

The date of March 31, 2015, following the Law 81/2014, has marked a historical transition with the final closure of the six forensic psychiatric hospitals in Italy. This law identifies a new pathway of care that involves small-scale high therapeutic profile facilities (Residenze per la Esecuzione della Misura di Sicurezza, REMS) instead of the old forensic psychiatric hospitals. The Law promotes a new recovery-oriented rehabilitation approach for the persons with mental disorders who committed a criminal offence, but lack criminal responsibility and deemed as socially dangerous.

Current nosology of treatment resistant depression: a controversy resistant to revision.

Treatment-Resistant Depression (TRD) represents a source of ongoing clinical and nosological controversy and confusion. While no univocal consensus on its definition and specific correlation with major mood disorders has been reached to date, a progressively greater number of evidences tend to suggest a revision of current clinical nosology. Since a better assessment of TRD should be considered mandatory in order to achieve the most appropriate clinical management, this narrative review aims to briefly present current most accepted definitions of the phenomenon, speculating on its putative bipolar diathesis for some of the cases originally assessed as unipolar depression.

Prefrontal cortex dysfunction during cognitive tests evidenced by functional near-infrared spectroscopy.

Prefrontal cortex oxygenation changes in response to a verbal fluency task and a visual spatial working memory task were investigated by functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) on nine patients with schizophrenia. Four patients were reactive to both tests; five reactive to only one of the two tests, suggesting the importance of reporting fNIRS results for each individual.

[Validation of the Italian version of the Self-report Insight Scale].

Aims: To evaluate the psychometric properties of the Italian version of the Insight Scale (IS), self-report questionnaire assessing the awareness of psychiatric illness. The instrument contains two forms, the first A that enquires about the present status, and the second B that concerns past episodes of illness.

Method: Factorial structure, internal consistency and concurrent validity (towards three selected items of the 24-item BPRS, Unusual thought content", Conceptual disorganization and Uncooperativeness) were studied on 80 chronic subjects affected by schizophrenia.