Exploring practice staffs' perspectives regarding professional roles, confidence, and motivations in delivering mental health care within rural general practice: a qualitative exploration.

Background: General practice is pivotal in delivering mental health care within communities, yet the attitudes and professional factors influencing this provision remain underexplored. This study seeks to understand the perspective of general practice staff around the professional factors that influence the provision of primary mental health care.

Methods: A qualitative study was conducted with semi-structured interviews of 14 general practice staff involved in mental health care.

Strengthening Neuroplasticity in Substance Use Recovery Through Lifestyle Intervention.

The incidence of substance use and behavioral addictions continues to increase throughout the world. The Global Burden of Disease Study shows a growing impact in disability-adjusted life years due to substance use. Substance use impacts families, communities, health care, and legal systems; yet, the vast majority of individuals with substance use disorders do not seek treatment.

Evaluation of lived experience Peer Support intervention for mental health service consumers in Primary Care (PS-PC): study protocol for a stepped-wedge cluster randomised controlled trial.

Background: The demand for mental health services in Australia is substantial and has grown beyond the capacity of the current workforce. As a result, it is currently difficult for many to access secondary healthcare providers. Within the secondary healthcare sector, however, peer workers who have lived experience of managing mental health conditions have been increasingly employed to intentionally use their journey of recovery in supporting others living with mental health conditions and their communities.

Clinical guidelines for the use of lifestyle-based mental health care in major depressive disorder: World Federation of Societies for Biological Psychiatry (WFSBP) and Australasian Society of Lifestyle Medicine (ASLM) taskforce.

Objectives: The primary objectives of these international guidelines were to provide a global audience of clinicians with (a) a series of evidence-based recommendations for the provision of lifestyle-based mental health care in clinical practice for adults with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) and (b) a series of implementation considerations that may be applicable across a range of settings.

Methods: Recommendations and associated evidence-based gradings were based on a series of systematic literature searches of published research as well as the clinical expertise of taskforce members. The focus of the guidelines was eight lifestyle domains: physical activity and exercise, smoking cessation, work-directed interventions, mindfulness-based and stress management therapies, diet, sleep, loneliness and social support, and green space interaction.

The Potential Impact of a Public Health Approach to Improving the Physical Health of People Living with Mental Illness.

With already wide disparities in physical health and life expectancy, COVID-19 presents people with mental illness with additional threats to their health: decreased access to health services, increased social isolation, and increased socio-economic disadvantage. Each of these factors has exacerbated the risk of poor health and early death for people with mental illness post-COVID-19. Unless effective primary care and preventative health responses are implemented, the physical illness epidemic for this group will increase post the COVID-19 pandemic.

Lifestyle interventions in the management of substance use disorder.

Background: Substance use disorder (SUD) is a persistent problem within society and an issue of increasing community awareness and concern. SUD is often comorbid with significant mental health challenges, trauma and negative social determinants of health. SUDs contribute to increased burden of chronic disease and can lead to increased mortality and shorter life expectancy, not just through overdose but also through increased rates of mental and physical chronic disease.

Evaluating telehealth lifestyle therapy versus telehealth psychotherapy for reducing depression in adults with COVID-19 related distress: the curbing anxiety and depression using lifestyle medicine (CALM) randomised non-inferiority trial protocol.

Background: There is increasing recognition of the substantial burden of mental health disorders at an individual and population level, including consequent demand on mental health services. Lifestyle-based mental healthcare offers an additional approach to existing services with potential to help alleviate system burden. Despite the latest Royal Australian New Zealand College of Psychiatrists guidelines recommending that lifestyle is a 'first-line', 'non-negotiable' treatment for mood disorders, few such programs exist within clinical practice.

An expectation-maximization algorithm for positron emission particle tracking.

We develop a new algorithm for the tracking of radioactive particles using Positron Emission Particle Tracking (PEPT). The algorithm relies on the maximization of the likelihood of a simple Gaussian mixture model of the lines of response associated with positron annihilation. The model includes a component that accounts for spurious lines caused by scattering and random coincidence, and it treats the relative activity of particles as well as their positions as parameters to be inferred.

The Mind-Body Well-being Initiative: a better lifestyle for people with severe mental illness.

Objective: This article aims to describe 'The Mind-Body Well-being Initiative', a residential mental health treatment model based on the Lifestyle Medicine paradigm, which comprises a mind and body well-being programme. In people with severe mental illness (SMI), particularly for those experiencing psychotic illness, the physical health and mortality gap is significant with greater presence of chronic disease and a 15-20-year life expectancy gap.

Conclusions: Our AIM Self-Capacity model of care attempts to address the physical and mental health care needs for the promotion of our patients' recovery.

Lifestyle interventions for mental health.

Background: Mental illness is the single most common reason for patient visits to a general practitioner (GP). Prevalent mental illnesses include major depression disorder and dysthymia, anxiety disorders, bipolar disorders and schizophrenia. Patients with severe mental illness have a 10-20-year shorter life expectancy when compared with the general population, primarily due to physical chronic disease.

Experimental benchmarking of Monte Carlo simulations for radiotherapy dosimetry using monochromatic X-ray beams in the presence of metal-based compounds.

The local dose deposition obtained in X-ray radiotherapy can be increased by the presence of metal-based compounds in the irradiated tissues. This finding is strongly enhanced if the radiation energy is chosen in the kiloelectronvolt energy range, due to the proximity to the absorption edge. In this study, we present a MC application developed with the toolkit Geant4 to investigate the dosimetric distribution of a uniform monochromatic X-ray beam, and benchmark it against experimental measurements.

PRaVDA: The first solid-state system for proton computed tomography.

Purpose: Proton CT is widely recognised as a beneficial alternative to conventional X-ray CT for treatment planning in proton beam radiotherapy. A novel proton CT imaging system, based entirely on solid-state detector technology, is presented. Compared to conventional scintillator-based calorimeters, positional sensitive detectors allow for multiple protons to be tracked per read out cycle, leading to a potential reduction in proton CT scan time.