Negative symptoms in schizophrenia are associated with significant burden and possess little to no robust treatments in clinical practice today. One key obstacle impeding the development of better treatment methods is the lack of an objective measure. Since negative symptoms almost always adversely affect speech production in patients, speech dysfunction have been considered as a viable objective measure. However, researchers have mostly focused on the verbal aspects of speech, with scant attention to the non-verbal cues in speech. In this paper, we have explored non-verbal speech cues as objective measures of negative symptoms of schizophrenia. We collected an interview corpus of 54 subjects with schizophrenia and 26 healthy controls. In order to validate the non-verbal speech cues, we computed the correlation between these cues and the NSA-16 ratings assigned by expert clinicians. Significant correlations were obtained between these non-verbal speech cues and certain NSA indicators. For instance, the correlation between Turn Duration and Restricted Speech is -0.5, Response time and NSA Communication is 0.4, therefore indicating that poor communication is reflected in the objective measures, thus validating our claims. Moreover, certain NSA indices can be classified into observable and non-observable classes from the non-verbal speech cues by means of supervised classification methods. In particular the accuracy for Restricted speech quantity and Prolonged response time are 80% and 70% respectively. We were also able to classify healthy and patients using non-verbal speech features with 81.3% accuracy.
Introduction: The purpose of this study was to examine the experiences and perceptions of young people in an early psychosis program towards participating in a 10-week photovoice and exhibition project and the themes that had emerged from their photographs. Method: Photographs create meanings and participants are able to tell their stories in a meaningful way. Eleven clients who had gone through a prior 10-week photovoice project and exhibition consented to being interviewed for this study. Clients chose and brought to the interview photos of theirs that had been exhibited. Structured questions were asked to generate discussions. Findings: Findings illustrated that participants were keen to educate the general public on mental health issues. They craved acceptance and were keen to make connections and build relationships. They were their own agents of change. Supportive networks create hope, which in turn helps people with mental health issues to reframe their outlook. Conclusion: The results of this study are important and provide occupational therapists with another tool for intervention and advocacy. As both photovoice and occupational therapy focus on the process rather than the product, occupational therapists can utilize photography in groups creatively to generate more client-and peer-led discussions.
These findings indicate that MoCA is a useful bedside cognitive screening instrument for people with schizophrenia.
Negative symptoms of schizophrenia are often associated with the blunting of emotional affect which creates a serious impediment in the daily functioning of the patients. Affective prosody is almost always adversely impacted in such cases, and is known to exhibit itself through the low-level acoustic signals of prosody. To automate and simplify the process of assessment of severity of emotion related symptoms of schizophrenia, we utilized these low-level acoustic signals to predict the expert subjective ratings assigned by a trained psychologist during an interview with the patient. Specifically, we extract acoustic features related to emotion using the openSMILE toolkit from the audio recordings of the interviews. We analysed the interviews of 78 paid participants (52 patients and 26 healthy controls) in this study. The subjective ratings could be accurately predicted from the objective openSMILE acoustic signals with an accuracy of 61-85% using machine-learning algorithms with leave-oneout cross-validation technique. Furthermore, these objective measures can be reliably utilized to distinguish between the patient and healthy groups, as supervised learning methods can classify the two groups with 79-86% accuracy.
Purpose: The current study was undertaken to understand and describe the meaning of work as well as the barriers and facilitators perceived by young people with mental health conditions for gaining and maintaining employment. Materials and Methods: Employing a purposive and maximum variation sampling, 30 young people were recruited and interviewed. The respondents were Singapore residents with a mean age of 26.8 years (SD ¼ 4.5, range 20-34 years); the majority were males (56.7%), of Chinese ethnicity (63.3%), and employed (73.3%), at the time of the interview. Verbatim transcripts were analysed using inductive thematic analysis. Results: Three global themes emerged from the analyses of the narratives, which included (i) the meaning of employment, (ii) barriers to employment comprising individual, interpersonal and systemic difficulties and challenges participants faced while seeking and sustaining employment and (iii) facilitators of employment that consisted of individual and interpersonal factors that had helped the young persons to gain and maintain employment. Conclusions: Stigma and discrimination emerged as one of the most frequently mentioned employment barriers. These barriers are not insurmountable and can be overcome both through legislation as well as through the training and support of young people with mental health conditions. ä IMPLICATIONS FOR REHABILITATION Employment offers several benefits to people with mental health conditions, including improvement in economic status, self-efficacy, and empowerment. Stigma is a significant barrier to employment for young people with mental health conditions; remaining optimistic about career prospects and getting support from peers is vital to employment success. Disclosure of the mental health condition at the place of work is beneficial to the person's own recovery and helpful to others; however, young people must be empowered to choose when and what they want to disclose and under what circumstances. Families help young people with mental health conditions in achieving their employment goals by offering emotional and instrumental support, as well as motivating them to accomplish more.
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