Clozapine therapy demonstrated superiority to olanzapine therapy in preventing suicide attempts in patients with schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder at high risk for suicide. Use of clozapine in this population should lead to a significant reduction in suicidal behavior.

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Background: To gain an understanding of the process of recruitment, studying changes in attitudes and views towards psychiatry among Spanish medical students during their fourth academic year. Methods: A 33-item questionnaire was administered to 48 medical students before and after having completed training in psychiatry. Comparative data analysis was carried out using the Wilcoxon test. Results: The comparison showed that there was a reduction in the number of students reporting that "psychiatrists abuse their legal power", that "for most specialists in this area, psychiatry was not their preferred choice" and that "those students interested in psychiatry are regarded as odd or peculiar". However, the view that "psychiatry is an expanding frontier of medicine" decreased among the students. The percentage of students considering psychiatry as a future career rose from 4.2% to 10.4% after training. Conclusions: The students' opinions change with the experience of training in psychiatry and become more realistic. Alongside these changes in attitudes, there is an increase in the proportion of students willing to consider psychiatry as a future career, which suggests that there is no reduction in vocations for psychiatry among Spanish students.

Providing information and educating patients about their illness and options for treatment is an essential part of medical practice. Little is known about medical students' and residents' training in these skills, however. It is well known that cooperation, effective communication, and a good relationship between the psychiatrist, the patient, and the patient's family improve the prognosis of severe mental illness. If the patient and family members are expected to become competent partners and to cooperate in long-term treatment, psychiatrists have to share information about the illness and its treatment with them. As providers of care, psychiatrists obviously have the knowledge and experience that patients and their families do not. The only way to bridge this natural knowledge gap is to share the information in a comprehensible and structured way, in what is known today as psychoeducation. What Is Psychoeducation and Where Does It Help?Psychoeducation is the provision of systematic, relevant, broad, and up-to-date information about an illness or condition, including its diagnosis and treatment. Psychoeducational programs provide both disease-specific information, e.g., early recognition and management of relapse symptoms or any potential genetic implications of the illness and general information, e.g., promotion of healthy lifestyle, problem-solving and communication skills training, identification of stressors in households, and education of family members and primary care takers in their amelioration. Furthermore, psychoeducation includes information on how to explain aspects of living with an illness to family members so that they can understand the effect of the illness and assist the patient and treatment providers in the treatment program.There is evidence that psychoeducation improves the outcomes of mental illness and many other medical illnesses. Family interventions, including psychoeducation for schizophrenia, have proved to be one of the most consistently effective treatment modalities available, with relapse rate reduction at 50-60% over treatment as usual [1,2]. Besides relapse severity reduction, psychoeducation leads to less frequent relapses, better treatment adherence, lower self-stigma, better quality of life, improvement of social competencies, active engagement in rehabilitation, and lower cost of care, either alone or as a part of complex treatment regimen [3][4][5][6][7]. Thus, family psychoeducation is recommended in several schizophrenia treatment guidelines [8][9][10], for example, as an evidence-based intervention.There is similar evidence that psychoeducation and family interventions may reduce the recurrence of bipolar disorders and depression. Psychoeducation and cognitive behavioral therapy are associated with increased time to mood episode relapse or recurrence [11,12]. Preliminary evidence shows that family psychoeducation for patients with depressive disorders improves patient functioning and the well-being of family caregivers [13]. Similarly, psychoeducation seems to reduce...

All three groups surveyed rated the majority of items as Important or Very Important, indicating that they value professional behavior. Resident physicians had the highest mean score in every category measured. Overall, medical students rated most items related to professionalism as less important than the two other groups surveyed.