Publications by authors named "Victor Pereira-Sanchez"

Article Synopsis
  • Benzodiazepines are drugs often given by doctors, but using them for a long time can cause problems like dependence and side effects.
  • A study looked at tweets from people talking about benzodiazepines to understand what the public thinks about them.
  • Most tweets were positive, focusing on how effective these drugs are, but didn’t mention the bad effects, which shows the need for more education on the risks of using them long-term.
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Background: Hikikomori refers to the extreme isolation of individuals in their own homes, lasting at least six months. In recent years social isolation has become an important clinical, social, and public health problem, with increased awareness of hikikomori around the globe. Portuguese is one of the six most spoken languages in the world, but no studies have analysed the content regarding this phenomenon expressed in Portuguese.

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Background: During the early pandemic, there was substantial variation in public and government responses to COVID-19 in Europe and the United States. Mass media are a vital source of health information and news, frequently disseminating this information through social media, and may influence public and policy responses to the pandemic.

Objective: This study aims to describe the extent to which major media outlets in the United States and Spain tweeted about health-related behaviors (HRBs) relevant to COVID-19, compare the tweeting patterns between media outlets of both countries, and determine user engagement in response to these tweets.

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Article Synopsis
  • Violence against psychiatry trainees is a significant yet under-researched issue in Asia, with a study exploring the rates and contributing factors of such violence.
  • An online survey received 467 responses from trainees across 16 Asian countries, revealing that over 69% had experienced some form of assault, particularly in inpatient settings.
  • The study highlighted that East Asian countries reported fewer assaults, and sexual assaults were more frequent among female trainees, emphasizing the need for more protective programs and further research.
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Background: Increasing reports of manic episodes in patients during acute infection with COVID-19 have been documented since the pandemic began, including individuals without a previous personal or family history of bipolar disorder. As infections and autoimmunity have putative roles in bipolar disorder, we aimed to document the clinical presentations, associated stressors, family aggregation patterns, and brain imaging and electroencephalographic correlates with a series of patients with episodes of mania that emerged shortly after COVID-19 infections.

Methods: We obtained all relevant clinical information from 12 patients whose first manic episode started within a month of COVID-19 infection and were treated at Rasool-e-Akram hospital and Iran psychiatric hospital, two tertiary medical centers in Tehran, Iran, in 2021.

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In Kenya, there is a treatment gap for depression and alcohol use that is especially large for fathers, which has consequences for families. While treatments exist, there are challenges to implementation. This study aimed to understand barriers and facilitators to implementing a treatment for fathers' depression and alcohol use in Eldoret, Kenya.

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Despite the speedy development of vaccines for COVID-19, their rollout has posed a major public health challenge, as vaccine hesitancy (VH) and refusal are high. Addressing vaccine hesitancy is a multifactorial and context-dependent challenge. This perspective focuses on VH in the world region of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) and includes people suffering from severe mental illness, therefore covering populations and subpopulations often neglected in scientific literature.

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Climate change has become a global emergency, which mental health effects are increasingly being described and understood. Children and adolescents, especially those in low income countries and minority communities, are particularly vulnerable to experience the worst impacts of climate change now and in the coming decades. Our group of early career mental health clinicians and researchers in nine culturally and socioeconomic different countries across three continents initiated a global, online discussion about the effects of climate change on the mental health of children and adolescents, based on literature and our professional experience.

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The internet has become an indispensable tool in people´s daily lives during the COVID-19 pandemic. Internet and video game use are experiencing rapid growth in the youth and adult populations as a major source of entertainment. However, excessive gaming may cause addiction and negatively impact mental health, entailing low psychosocial well-being, poor social skills, and decreased academic achievement.

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Grief is the physical or mental suffering experienced after a major loss, usually the death of a loved one. It is a universal experience, but sociocultural factors, such as cultural or ethnic identity and religious beliefs predict and shape the expression of grief. The circumstances under which people are experiencing grief during the coronavirus outbreak have adversely affected the grieving process.

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Clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) are systematically developed statements to assist practitioner and patient decisions about appropriate health care for specific clinical circumstances. CPGs have evolved during the last 2 decades from general consensus statements by prominent practitioners in the field to highly structured instruments. The Institute of Medicine has laid out specific standards for selecting the experts who develop a CPG and the process by which CPGs are developed.

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The preva lence of long-COVID symptoms is rising but it is not still possible to predict which patients will present them, and which types of symptoms they will present. We followed up 95 patients with confirmed COVID-19 for 9 months to identify and characterize long-COVID symptoms. Easy fatigability was the most common symptom (51.

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Background: Hikikomori is a form of severe social withdrawal that is particularly prevalent in Japan. Social media posts offer insight into public perceptions of mental health conditions and may also inform strategies to identify, engage, and support hard-to-reach patient populations such as individuals affected by hikikomori.

Objective: In this study, we seek to identify the types of content on Twitter related to hikikomori in the Japanese language and to assess Twitter users' engagement with that content.

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Amoud University in Borama is located in the self-declared state of Somaliland, in the Horn of Africa. Past conflicts and resulting economic hardship have led to a lack of local academic psychiatry faculty and resources. Amoud has been for some years partnering with voluntary faculty in the United Kingdom to teach psychiatry to its medical students through in-person "teaching missions.

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There is an increasing movement toward international collaboration and global discussion in mental health. If provided with the right opportunities, early career psychiatrists (ECPs) and researchers in mental health can contribute meaningfully to this discussion. However, they often experience multiple barriers when attempting to add their voices via academic publications.

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Neuroimaging research seeks to identify biomarkers to improve the diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), although clinical translation of findings remains distant. Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (R-fMRI) is increasingly being used to characterize functional connectivity in the brain. Despite mixed results to date and multiple methodological challenges, dominant hypotheses implicate hyperconnectivity across brain networks in patients with ADHD, which could be the target of pharmacological treatments.

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Introduction: Varying public views on cannabis use across countries may explain the variation in the prevalence of use, policies, and research in individual countries, and global regulation of cannabis. This paper aims to describe the current state of cannabis use, policies, and research across sixteen countries.

Methods: PubMed and Google Scholar were searched for studies published from 2010 to 2020.

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Objective: Recently, rational polypharmacy approaches have been proposed, regardless of the lower risk and cost of monotherapy. Considering monotherapy as first-line treatment and polypharmacy as rational treatment, a balanced attitude toward polypharmacy is recommended. However, the high prevalence of polypharmacy led the Japanese government to establish a polypharmacy reduction policy.

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Objectives: Violence by patients against health care professionals has been widely described. Although psychiatric trainees are particularly exposed, little is known about the extent, context, and impact of violence toward them in Europe.

Methods: A cross-sectional online survey was distributed between June 2018 and December 2019 among European psychiatric trainees through professional networks, using a snowball approach.

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