Volume 1 Issue 7, July 2023

In this Q&A, we speak to US Congresswoman Judy Chu (D-CA), who has served as the representative for the 28th congressional district of California since 2009. In addition to being a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, she has also been a member of the Subcommittees on Health, Worker and Family Support, and Oversight that oversee legislation pertaining to health programs, healthcare reform, and research.

This Comment highlights the intertwined nature of mental and brain health and disease. Common genetic, environmental and lifestyle factors contribute to psychiatric and neurological disorders, which partially share neurocognitive and pathophysiological mechanisms. A call for a more dimensional, interdisciplinary approach can accelerate the development of robust approaches to research, prevention and intervention.

Utilizing an everyday citizenship approach in forensic psychiatric care, by recognizing the agentive actions and relational interactions in mundane activities and caregiving communications, could substantially enhance and advance care practices.

Men often experience mental health issues in silence. This Comment considers the many manifestations of silence in men’s mental illness, which serve to reduce subjective wellbeing and social/occupational functioning amid elevating suicide risk.

Psychotic phenomena in early Parkinson’s disease are understudied and underappreciated. Bernasconi et al.¹ report that such phenomena, when combined with evidence of low-frequency activity in frontal regions on EEG, herald a later decline in frontal cognitive functions, underlining their significance and need for timely, accurate detection.

In this Review, Hodes and Kropp discuss the lessons we have learned from using sex as a biological variable in stress and mood disorder research and how we should shape our questions to avoid sex-based disparities in mental health care.

Galante et al. performed a systematic review and meta-analysis using individual participant data from randomized controlled trials evaluating mindfulness-based programs for adult mental health promotion in non-clinical settings.

In this longitudinal study, Bernasconi and colleagues explore the association of minor hallucinations and theta oscillations with the future occurrence of cognitive decline in patients with early Parkinson’s disease.

In this secondary analysis of a clinical trial exploring the efficacy of Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement (MORE) versus supportive group psychotherapy for reducing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms in patients with chronic pain receiving opioid treatment, the authors demonstrate that increased cognitive reappraisal mediated reduced PTSD symptoms and opioid misuse after the MORE intervention.

Kozák and colleagues use routinely collected data from more than 500,000 Norwegian adolescents to examine the effects before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic on well-being and explore the impact of social inequality.

In this paper describing the impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic on a large public mental health system, the authors examined the availability and service uptake of telepsychiatry over 2 years in a regional network of community mental health centres covering approximately 10 million people in Italy.