Meditation and mindfulness are practices that can support healthcare professionals, patients, carers and the general public during times of crisis such as the current global pandemic caused by Covid-19. While there are many forms of meditation and mindfulness, of particular interest to healthcare professionals are those with an evidence base such as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). Systematic reviews of such practices have shown improvements in measures of anxiety, depression and pain scores. Structural and functional brain changes have been demonstrated in the brains of people with a long term traditional meditation practice, and in people who have completed a MBSR programme. Mindfulness and meditation practices translate well to different populations across the life span and range of ability. Introducing a mindfulness and meditation practice during this pandemic has the potential to complement treatment and is a low cost beneficial method of providing support with anxiety for all.
Many people with first episode psychosis do not initiate help-seeking for themselves particularly those with a relative affected by mental illness. Those with poor premorbid adjustment are at particular risk of longer delays. Poor premorbid adjustment compounded by long delays to effective treatment reduces the likelihood of a good outcome. Families play a vital role in hastening receipt of effective treatment.
Theory of mind deficits in schizophrenia have been parsed into mental state
reasoning and mental state decoding components. We report that mental state
decoding as measured by the ‘Eyes task’ better predicted social
function than mental state reasoning as measured by the ‘Hinting
task’ in 73 out-patients with chronic schizophrenia. Mental state
decoding task performance also partly mediated the influence of basic
neuropsychological performance on social function. We discuss these findings
in terms of the accumulating evidence that mental state decoding has
particular relevance for understanding deficits in social function in
schizophrenia.
Poor insight is associated with impaired cognitive function in psychosis. Whether poor clinical insight overlaps with other aspects of self-awareness in schizophrenia, such as cognitive self-awareness, is unclear. We investigated whether awareness of clinical state ("clinical insight") and awareness of cognitive deficits ("cognitive insight") overlap in schizophrenia in a sample of 51 stabilized patients with chronic schizophrenia. Cognitive insight was assessed in terms of the agreement between subjective self-report and neuropsychological assessment. Patients who show good cognitive insight did not necessarily show good clinical insight. By contrast, self-report and objective neuropsychological assessment only correlated for patients in the intact clinical insight group and not for those in the impairment clinical insight group. We conclude that while good cognitive insight may not be necessary for good clinical insight, good cognitive awareness is at least partly reliant on the processes involved in clinical insight.
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