[Effects on health of the L'Aquila (Central Italy) 2009 earthquake].

Background: an earthquake of 6.3 magnitude struck the town and province of L'Aquila on 6th April 2009. About 100,000 buildings were damaged, 1,600 people remained injured and 309 deceased; 66,000 people were left homeless by the disaster.

[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.

Effectiveness of collaborative care for depression in Italy. A randomized controlled trial.

Trial Design: This was a multicenter cluster-randomized controlled trial.

Participants: A total of 227 patients ≥18 years old with a new onset of depressive symptoms who screened positive on the first two items of the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) were recruited by primary care physicians (PCPs) of eight health districts of three Italian regions from September 2009 to June 2011.

Intervention: PCPs of the intervention group received a specific collaborative care program including 2 days of intensive training, implementation of a stepped care protocol, depression management toolkit and scheduled meetings with a dedicated consultant psychiatrist.

Pragmatic language and theory of mind deficits in people with schizophrenia and their relatives.

Background: Deficits in theory of mind have frequently been observed in people affected by illnesses characterized by disrupted social behaviour like autism and psychoses. In schizophrenia, a pragmatic deficit in expressive language can also be observed. The present study was designed in order to assess the suitability of theory of mind and pragmatic conversation abilities as possible cognitive endophenotypes of schizophrenia.

Relapsing versus non relapsing course of schizophrenia: a cohort study in a community based mental health service.

Aim: We examined the effect of several clinical variables on the tendency to relapse and to require hospitalization in a cohort of patients, living in the community and followed up naturalistically for seven years.

Method: Forty-six patients affected by schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder, according to both DSM-IV and ICD-10 criteria, were assessed by Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale and Life Skills Profile (LSP). All patients consecutively enrolled, were assessed in a stable clinical phase of illness and treated as usual by their reference psychiatrist.

Deficit of social cognition in subjects with surgically treated frontal lobe lesions and in subjects affected by schizophrenia.

The ability of humans to predict and explain other people's behaviour by attributing independent mental states such as desires and beliefs to them, is considered to be due to our ability to construct a "Theory of Mind". Recently, several neuroimaging studies have implicated the medial frontal lobes as playing a critical role in a dedicated "mentalizing" or "Theory of Mind" network in the human brain. In this study we compare the performance of patients with right and left medial prefrontal lobe lesions in theory of mind and in social cognition tasks, with the performance of people with schizophrenia.

The natural course of schizophrenia and psychopathological predictors of outcome. A community-based cohort study.

The natural course of schizophrenia is extremely heterogeneous and generally considered unpredictable. This prospective research investigated the natural course of schizophrenia in a community-based population linked to an Italian Mental Health Center, looking for the identification of psychopathological predictors of outcome. Forty schizophrenic patients were assessed at baseline in a stabilized phase of illness with clinical scales of psychopathology and social functioning and afterwards were followed up for 36 months.

Electroencephalographic Seizure Duration in Electroconvulsive Therapy: A Clinical Study.

Electroencephalographic estimates of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT)-induced seizure duration were obtained in 141 patients with major depression (n = 41) or schizophrenia (n = 100). A slight reduction in seizure duration across a course of ECT failed to reach statistical significance and was unrelated to clinical improvement.