Use of Text Messaging for Postpartum Depression Screening and Information Provision.

Objective: The objective of this study was to evaluate the feasibility of using text messages to enhance mental health screening and education of women in the immediate postpartum period.

Methods: A total of 937 postpartum women were recruited from an obstetrics and gynecology clinic of a large urban hospital. Participants received a text message containing a two-question screen for postpartum depression every two weeks and three text messages per week about postpartum mental health for the first 12 weeks postpartum.

Psychotherapy Competency Milestones: an Exploratory Pilot of CBT and Psychodynamic Psychotherapy Skills Acquisition in Junior Psychiatry Residents.

Objective: Psychiatry residents train in Psychodynamic Psychotherapy and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), evidence-supported treatments used in mental health care that can facilitate clinical reasoning, foster therapeutic alliances, and improve clinical outcomes. However, empirically derived milestones are needed to evaluate competency. This exploratory pilot examined changes over 1 year of training in junior psychiatry residents' competency milestone elements in Psychodynamic Psychotherapy and CBT.

Improving physician-patient communication through coaching of simulated encounters.

Objective: Effective communication between physicians and their patients is important in optimizing patient care. This project tested a brief, intensive, interactive medical education intervention using coaching and standardized psychiatric patients to teach physician-patient communication to family medicine trainees.

Methods: Twenty-six family medicine trainees (9 PGY1, 11 PGY2, 6 fellows) from five university-affiliated hospitals conducted four once-weekly, 30-minute videotaped interviews with "difficult" standardized patients.

Relationship between social support and autonomic function during a stress protocol in ulcerative colitis patients in remission.

Background: The relationship of psychological stress to relapse in ulcerative colitis (UC) is inconsistent. This may be due to a failure to identify patient characteristics, such as social support, which moderate the transduction of stress from the central nervous system to the immune system. In this study we tested the hypothesis that social support enhances parasympathetic modulation of heart rate in UC.

The impact of attachment insecurity and sleep disturbance on symptoms and sick days in hospital-based health-care workers.

Objective: Adult attachment insecurity is associated with many health outcomes and may be associated with sleep disturbance. The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that sleep disturbance mediates the relationship between attachment insecurity and three measures of health (perceived general health, physical symptoms and sick days) in a group that is at high risk of sleep disturbance: hospital based health-care workers.

Methods: One hundred thirty-one nondepressed female hospital workers completed self-report measures of adult attachment, sleep disturbance, depressive symptoms (excluding sleep-related items) and health outcomes.