This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Arabia, and to some extent in Turkey, reduced ORs were observed for Austria, China, Italy, Japan and the USA. Elevated ORs for psychological distress were seen in Japan, Jordan, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and Turkey but reduced ORs were noted in Austria, China, Iran, Italy and the USA. Psychological distress was strongly associated with reports of suicide ideation and attempts. Suicide ideation, suicide attempt and psychological distress are common in university students but their rates vary depending on the sociocultural context. Permanent repository linkDue attention should be devoted to the mental health needs of young adults enrolled in higher educational institutions and more cross-cultural research is warranted to better understand the etiology of the observed intersocietal variations in suicidal behavior and psychological distress.

Background:The acquisition of social and emotional skills is associated with positive youth development, character education, healthy lifestyle behaviours, reduction in depression and anxiety, conduct disorders, violence, bullying, conflict, and anger. School-based interventions aimed to enhance these skills go beyond a problem-focused approach to embrace a more positive view of health; they could also improve the youth’s wellbeing.Aim:To describe the main features and to establish the effectiveness of universal school-based RCTs for children and the youth, aimed to promote their psychosocial wellbeing, positive development, healthy lifestyle behaviours and/or academic performance by improving their emotional and social skills.Methods:Systematic review by searching for relevant papers in PubMed/Medline with the following key words: “mental health” OR “wellbeing” OR “health promotion” OR “emotional learning” OR “social learning” OR “emotional and social learning” OR “positive youth development” OR “life skills” OR “life skills training” AND “school”. Interval was set from January 2000 to April 2014.Results:1,984 papers were identified through the search. Out of them 22 RCTs were included. While most interventions were characterized by a whole-school approach and SAFE practices, few studies only used standardized measures to assess outcomes, or had collected follow-up data after ≥ 6 months. The results of all these trials were examined and discussed.Conclusion:Universal school-based RCTs to enhance emotional and social skills showed controversial findings, due to some methodological issues mainly. Nevertheless they show promising outcomes that are relatively far-reaching for children and youth wellbeing and therefore are important in the real world.

This paper reports the results of a comparative investigation of attitudes to suicide and suicidal persons in 5,572 university students from 12 countries. Participants filled out two scales measuring attitudes towards suicide and suicidal persons, a measure of psychological distress together with the questions about suicidal behavior. Results showed that the highest suicide acceptance scores were observed in Austrian, UK, Japanese and Saudi Arabian samples and the lowest scores were noted in Tunisian, Turkish, Iranian and Palestinian samples. While the highest social acceptance scores for a suicidal friend were noted in Turkish, US, Italian and Tunisian samples, the lowest scores were seen in Japanese, Saudi Arabian, Palestinian and Jordanian samples. Compared to participants with a suicidal past, those who were never suicidal displayed more internal barriers against suicidal behavior. Men were more accepting of suicide than women but women were more willing to help an imagined suicidal peer. Participants with accepting attitudes towards suicide but rejecting attitudes towards suicidal persons reported more suicidal behavior and psychological distress, and were more often from high suicide rate countries and samples than their counterparts. They are considered to be caught in a fatal trap in which most predominant feelings of suicidality such as hopelessness or helplessness are likely to occur. We conclude that in some societies such as Japan and Saudi Arabia it might be difficult for suicidal individuals to activate and make use of social support systems.

Antidepressants are currently the treatment of choice for major depressive disorder (MDD). Nevertheless, a high percentage of patients do not respond to a first-line antidepressant drug, and combination treatments and augmentation strategies increase the risk of side effects. Moreover, a significant proportion of patients are treatment-resistant. In the last 30 years, a number of studies have sought to establish whether exercise could be regarded as an alternative to antidepressants, but so far no specific analysis has examined the efficacy of exercise as an adjunctive treatment in combination with antidepressants. We carried out a systematic review to evaluate the effectiveness of exercise as an adjunctive treatment with antidepressants on depression. A search of relevant papers was carried out in PubMed/Medline, Google Scholar, and Scopus with the following keywords: "exercise," "physical activity," "physical fitness," "depressive disorder," "depression," "depressive symptoms," "add-on," "augmentation," "adjunction," and "combined therapy." Twenty-two full-text articles were retrieved by the search. Among the 13 papers that fulfilled our inclusion criteria, we found methodological weaknesses in the majority. However, the included studies showed a strong effectiveness of exercise combined with antidepressants. Further analyses and higher quality studies are needed; nevertheless, as we have focused on a particular intervention (exercise in adjunction to antidepressants) that better reflects clinical practice, we can hypothesize that this strategy could be appropriately and safely translated into real-world practice.

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