Anxiety and Depression Symptoms Among Young U.S. Essential Workers During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Objective: Emerging cross-sectional data indicate that essential workers in the COVID-19 era face increased mental health risks. This study longitudinally examined clinical symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder, depression, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among U.S.

Translational Neuroscience Approaches to Understanding Autism.

While autism spectrum disorder affects nearly 2% of children in the United States, little is known with certainty concerning the etiologies and brain systems involved. This is due, in part, to the substantial heterogeneity in the presentation of the core symptoms of autism as well as the great number of co-occurring conditions that are common in autistic individuals. Understanding the neurobiology of autism is further hampered by the limited availability of postmortem brain tissue to determine the cellular and molecular alterations that take place in the autistic brain.

Overrepresentation of In-Home, Natural Deaths Among Individuals Treated for Mental Illnesses in New York State.

Objective: The authors compared rates of in-home, natural death among individuals receiving treatment for mental illnesses with those in the general population.

Methods: Two data sets were used to determine the prevalence of in-home, natural deaths in the general population and among those receiving treatment for mental illnesses in New York State, outside New York City, for the period 2016-2018.

Results: Overall, 37% of natural deaths among individuals receiving mental health treatment occurred in the home, compared with 26% in the general population.

"It Is Hard to Be a Woman With Schizophrenia": Randomized Controlled Trial of a Brief Video Intervention to Reduce Public Stigma in Young Adults.

Women with schizophrenia encounter specific gender-related stressors that may affect their recovery process. They are more susceptible to victimization and tend to experience more shame and stigma about their illness. Confronting stigma early in the illness could enhance treatment seeking.

Reducing Public Stigma Towards Psychosis: A Conceptual Framework for Understanding the Effects of Social Contact Based Brief Video Interventions.

Background And Hypothesis: Public stigma reduces treatment-seeking and increases the duration of untreated psychosis among young people with psychosis. Social contact-based video interventions have been shown to be effective at reducing stigma; however, more research is needed regarding very brief interventions less than 2 minutes long, which are suitable for social media platforms and particularly relevant for young adults. We recently conducted three randomized control trials and demonstrated the efficacy of such videos to reduce stigma toward individuals with psychosis among young adults of the general public.

State Mental Health Authority Level of Involvement in Coordinated Specialty Care Clinics and Client Outcomes.

Objective: State mental health authorities (SMHAs) in all U.S. states and territories administer the Mental Health Block Grant (MHBG) set-aside funding for first-episode psychosis.

A Rapid Review of "Low-Threshold" Psychiatric Medication Prescribing: Considerations for Street Medicine and Beyond.

Objective: No widely accepted clinical guidelines, and scant directly applicable pragmatic research, are available to guide the prescription of psychiatric medications in "low-threshold" outpatient settings, such as street outreach, urgent care, and crisis care, as well as walk-in, shelter, and bridge and transition clinics. Providers frequently prescribe medications in these settings without patients' having firm psychiatric diagnoses and without medical records to guide clinical decision making. Persons who receive medications in these settings often seek help voluntarily and intermittently for mental illness symptoms.

"They are our eyes outside there in the community": Implementing enhanced training, management and monitoring of South Africa's ward-based primary healthcare outreach teams.

Introduction: In 2018, South Africa's National Department of Health provided additional resources for ward-based primary healthcare outreach teams (OT) with support from the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.

Prenatal Exposure to Air Pollution and Early-Life Stress Effects on Hippocampal Subregional Volumes and Associations With Visuospatial Reasoning.

Background: Children from economically distressed families and neighborhoods are at risk for stress and pollution exposure and potential neurotoxic sequelae. We examine dimensions of early-life stress affecting hippocampal volumes, how prenatal exposure to air pollution might magnify these effects, and associations between hippocampal volumes and visuospatial reasoning.

Methods: Fifty-three Hispanic/Latinx and/or Black children of ages 7 to 9 years were recruited from a longitudinal birth cohort for magnetic resonance imaging and cognitive assessment.

A novel long-acting formulation of oral buprenorphine/naloxone produces prolonged decreases in fentanyl self-administration by rhesus monkeys.

Background: Due to the poor oral bioavailability of buprenorphine, an oral formulation has not been thought possible. Lyndra Therapeutics is developing a once-weekly long-acting oral product containing buprenorphine. We evaluated the efficacy of this formulation in reducing intravenous (i.

Effectiveness of a community-based intervention to prevent childhood TB in Lesotho.

Child contact management (CCM) is a recognized strategy to prevent TB; however, implementation is suboptimal. PREVENT was a cluster-randomized trial that evaluated the effectiveness and acceptability of a community-based intervention (CBI) to improve CCM in Lesotho. Ten health facilities (HFs) were randomized to CBI or standard-of-care (SOC).

Development and initial validation of the Visual Social Anxiety Scale (VSAS): Could a picture be worth a thousand words?

Accurate assessment is crucial for determining appropriate therapeutic interventions for social anxiety and conducting sound clinical research. While self-report measures of social anxiety are widely used in both research and clinical settings, they have several drawbacks inherent to their textual nature. Here, we describe the development and initial validation of the Visual Social Anxiety Scale (VSAS), a novel picture-based self-report measure of social anxiety, based on the well-established widely-used Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale (LSAS).

Reducing public stigma toward individuals with psychosis across race and gender: A randomized controlled trial of young adults.

Background: Social contact-based interventions effectively reduce stigma toward psychosis. We recently demonstrated the efficacy of a 90-second video intervention in reducing stigma. The current randomized controlled study presents four briefer videos differing in presenter's gender/race, with baseline, postintervention, and 30-day follow-up assessments.

Associations Between Mobility, Food Insecurity, and Transactional Sex Among Women in Cohabitating Partnerships: An Analysis From 6 African Countries 2016-2017.

Background: Mobile women are at risk of HIV infection in sub-Saharan Africa, although we lack evidence for HIV risk among women in mobile partnerships, especially in the context of household food insecurity, a growing concern in the region.

Setting: Women aged 15-59 years with a cohabitating male partner who participated in population-based HIV impact assessment surveys in Eswatini, Lesotho, Namibia, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia.

Methods: We evaluated the association between women's and their partner's mobility (being away from home for more than 1 month or staying elsewhere) and transactional sex (selling sex or receiving money or goods in exchange for sex).

Neural substrates of emotional conflict with anxiety in major depressive disorder: Findings from the Establishing Moderators and biosignatures of Antidepressant Response in Clinical Care (EMBARC) randomized controlled trial.

Background: The brain circuitry of depression and anxiety/fear is well-established, involving regions such as the limbic system and prefrontal cortex. We expand prior literature by examining the extent to which four discrete factors of anxiety (immediate state anxiety, physiological/panic, neuroticism/worry, and agitation/restlessness) among depressed outpatients are associated with differential responses during reactivity to and regulation of emotional conflict.

Methods: A total of 172 subjects diagnosed with major depressive disorder underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging while performing an Emotional Stroop Task.

Effect of a Brief Social Contact Video on Transphobia and Depression-Related Stigma Among Adolescents: A Randomized Clinical Trial.

Importance: Transphobia and stigma remain barriers to seeking mental health care for gender-diverse adolescents.

Objective: To examine the utility of brief social contact-based video interventions of transgender protagonists with depression to reduce transphobia and depression-related stigma and increase treatment-seeking intentions among adolescents in the general population.

Design, Setting, And Participants: During August 2021, a total of 1437 participants were recruited and randomly assigned to 1 of 4 video-based conditions in a 2:2:1:1 ratio: (1) transgender adolescent girls, (2) transgender adolescent boys, (3) cisgender adolescent girls, or (4) cisgender adolescent boys.

Destigmatizing perceptions about Black adolescent depression: randomized controlled trial of brief social contact-based video interventions.

Objective: To test the utility of brief social contact-based video interventions of a Black adolescent girl to reduce stigmatized attitudes and increase help-seeking intentions around adolescent depression.

Methods: We conducted a randomized controlled trial (RCT) with 14- to18-year-old healthy volunteers drawn from the general US population. We enrolled participants through a crowdsourcing platform (n = 1,093) and randomly assigned participants to one of three video conditions (117 s each): depressed (DEP); depressed, adjusted to aspects unique to being a Black adolescent girl (including experienced or internalized racism; ADJ); and control (CONT).

Acceptability of Community-Based Tuberculosis Preventive Treatment for People Living with HIV in Zimbabwe.

As Zimbabwe expands tuberculosis preventive treatment (TPT) for people living with HIV (PLHIV), the Ministry of Health and Child Care is considering making TPT more accessible to PLHIV via less-intensive differentiated service delivery models such as Community ART Refill Groups (CARGs). We designed a study to assess the feasibility and acceptability of integrating TPT into CARGs among key stakeholders, including CARG members, in Zimbabwe. We conducted 45 key informant interviews (KII) with policy makers, implementers, and CARG leaders; 16 focus group discussions (FGD) with 136 PLHIV in CARGs; and structured observations of 8 CARG meetings.

Deep learning improves utility of tau PET in the study of Alzheimer's disease.

Introduction: Positron emission tomography (PET) imaging targeting neurofibrillary tau tangles is increasingly used in the study of Alzheimer's disease (AD), but its utility may be limited by conventional quantitative or qualitative evaluation techniques in earlier disease states. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are effective in learning spatial patterns for image classification.

Methods: 18F-MK6240 (n = 320) and AV-1451 (n = 446) PET images were pooled from multiple studies.

Patterns of Pretreatment Reward Task Brain Activation Predict Individual Antidepressant Response: Key Results From the EMBARC Randomized Clinical Trial.

Background: The lack of biomarkers to inform antidepressant selection is a key challenge in personalized depression treatment. This work identifies candidate biomarkers by building deep learning predictors of individual treatment outcomes using reward processing measures from functional magnetic resonance imaging, clinical assessments, and demographics.

Methods: Participants in the EMBARC (Establishing Moderators and Biosignatures of Antidepressant Response in Clinical Care) study (n = 222) underwent reward processing task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging at baseline and were randomized to 8 weeks of sertraline (n = 106) or placebo (n = 116).

Social Fragmentation and Schizophrenia: A Systematic Review.

Accumulating evidence implicates social context in the etiology of psychosis. One important line of epidemiologic research pointing to a potentially causal role of social context pertains to what is termed . The authors conducted a systematic review of the relationship between area-level social fragmentation and psychosis.