Obsessive-compulsive symptoms (OCS) are relatively common and clinically significant phenomena in schizophrenia patients, suggesting the existence of a separate schizo-obsessive subgroup of the disorder. Although a majority of schizo-obsessive patients have typical ego-dystonic OCS, a meaningful proportion exhibits diagnostically challenging psychopathological phenomena, psychotic in content and obsessive in form. We report the clinical and functional magnetic resonance imaging characteristics of a schizophrenia patient who developed auditory hallucinations with musical content and obsessive in form. We suggest that “obsessive musical hallucinations”, that integrate both psychotic and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)-related features, may be mediated by the brain networks believed to be involved in OCD and in auditory musical hallucinations.

Despite relevant evidence of physical illness promoting fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS), some authors claim that it is a psychological illness, or due to “psychological amplification.” Good evi-dence for such views is lacking. Selection processes lead to increased rates of psychological illness in general practice and in specialist practice. The phys-ical distress of FMS can increase both anxiety and depression. Questionable research supported by the insurance industry has tended to provide nega-tive and disparaging views of pain. Current imag-ing studies support the view that central effects connected with FMS relate to the processing of noxious stimulation more than affective disorder.

A growing body of evidence documents the value of structured psychotherapeutic interventions for the co-management of bipolar disorder in the context of ongoing medication treatment. This article reviews the rationale, elements, and outcomes for those psychosocial treatments for bipolar disorder that have been emmined in randomized trials. The available evidence suggests that interventions delivered in individual, group, or family settings, can provide significant benefit to patients undergoing pharmaco-theraby for bibolar disorder.

Debate continues regarding the relationship between shyness and social phobia. Some have proposed that this relationship is best understood by adopting a spectrum approach where increasing levels of shyness eventually merge into the clinical disorder of social phobia. This paper begins to explore the validity of this spectrum by reviewing similarities and differences between shyness and social phobia and investigating how shyness relates to social phobia subtypes. This paper will also explore precursors to social phobia, namely childhood behavioral inhibition.

Over the last 25 years, the perception of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) has changed; where once it was seen as a rare refractory disorder, it is now viewed as a fairly prevalent, but treatable, medical condition responding to two main therapeutic strategies—serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SRIs) and cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). Given the emergence of new results with SRIs, more data on the role of augmentation strategies with second-generation antipsychotics, and recent genetic and neuroimaging findings with potential for advancing the understanding of the pathogenesis of OCD, it was thought appropriate to revisit OCD in order to identify key developments in this field and examine how they might be translated into the clinical arena.This consensus statement is the product of the International Anxiety Disorders Conference that took place in Cape Town in February 2006, and is referred to as the Cape Town Consensus (CTC).

Hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD) is a common female sexual dysfunction and is estimated to affect approximately 10% of women in the United States. It has been suggested that HSDD is associated with an imbalance of hormone and neurotransmitter levels in the brain, resulting in decreased excitation, increased inhibition, or a combination of both. Evidence suggests neurotransmitters, including dopamine (DA), norepinephrine, and serotonin, as well as hormones such as estradiol and testosterone, contribute to female sexual desire and response. Current treatments for HSDD include psychotherapy, and two US Food and Drug Administration-approved medications for premenopausal women: flibanserin, a serotonin mixed agonist and antagonist, and bremelanotide, a melanocortin receptor (MCR) agonist. Melanocortins are endogenous neuropeptides associated with the excitatory pathway of the female sexual response system. MCRs are found throughout the body, including the brain. Bremelanotide is an MCR agonist that nonselectively activates several of the receptor subtypes, of which subtype 4 (MC4R) is the most relevant at therapeutic doses. MC4R is predominantly expressed in the medial preoptic area (mPOA) of the hypothalamus in the brain, and is important for female sexual function. Animal studies suggest that bremelanotide may affect female sexual desire by activating presynaptic MC4Rs on neurons in the mPOA of the hypothalamus, leading to increased release of DA, an excitatory neurotransmitter that increases sexual desire. This review presents what is known about the mechanism of action of bremelanotide in the context of treating HSDD.

A consensus conference on the reasons for the undertreatment of depression was organized by the National Depressive and Manic Depressive Association (NDMDA) on January 17–18,1996. The target audience included health policymakers, clinicians, patients and their families, and the public at large. Six key questions were addressed: (1) Is depression undertreated in the community and in the clinic? (2) What is the economic cost to society of depression? (3) What have been the efforts in the past to redress undertreatment and how successful have they been? (4) What are the reasons for the gap between our knowledge of the diagnosis and treatment of depression and actual treatment received in this country? (5) What can we do to narrow this gap? (6) What can we do immediately to narrow this gap?

Emotional difficulties, such as anxiety and depression, are common after acquired brain injury in adults and can influence long-term outcome. Diagnosis in a brain injury context can be difficult. Ideally, rehabilitation approaches should consider the specific treatment of anxiety and depression as well and may include pharmacotherapy, individual psychotherapy, and family interventions. Psychotherapy, especially in regards to longer-term adjustment to brain injury, may have an important adjunctive role in treatment approaches, but adaptations of techniques may be needed. A clinical pathway is described which can help to raise clinicians' awareness, as well as increase detection rates and consideration of the specific role of individual psychotherapy in this clinical population. However, an important caveat is that clinical pathways should not serve as a substitute, but rather a facilitator, for the process of reasoning about individual patients in everyday clinical practice.

The management of mood disorders during pregnancy is complex due to risks associated with medication use and risks associated with untreated depression. Antidepressant use during pregnancy is an exposure for the unborn child, and it currently remains unclear what long-term repercussions there might be from this exposure, though available data are reassuring. On the other hand, there are risks for both the mother and child of untreated depression during pregnancy. There is a real need for research into nonpharmacological strategies for the prevention of relapse of mood disorders in pregnant women who are off medications. We have reviewed a number of potential candidate interventions including psychotherapies, exercise, light box therapy (LBT), repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), holistic strategies, and nutritional and herbal supplements. Currently there is a lack of evidence supporting the use of such strategies in the prevention of depressive relapse during pregnancy, though most of these strategies have at least some support for their use in the treatment of a major depressive episode. Carefully conducted research using one or more of these strategies in women who want to discontinue antidepressants for pregnancy is sorely needed.

For decades clinicians and researchers have been thinking and writing about the spectrum of schizophrenia disorders. Indeed both Kraepelin and Bleuler believed in schizophrenia as a spectrum, both in a clinical (individual) and hereditary (family) continuum, from just some exquisite personality traits to unquestionable chronic and debilitating psychosis. Other authors would put the schizophrenia spectrum disorders on different levels of continuum: developmental, psychofunctional, existential, and genetic. Here, we would like to present an historical chronology for the schizophrenia–schizoaffective–bipolar spectra plus a tridimensional model for these spectra: the first axis for categories (affective versus nonaffective psychoses), the second axis for dimensions (personality versus full blown psychosis), and a third axis for biomarkers (remission versus relapse). We believe that without the schizophrenia–schizoaffective–bipolar spectra concept in our minds all our efforts will keep failing one the hardest quest: searching for biomarkers in schizophrenia and related disorders.

Cognitive deficits are a prominent and enduring aspect of schizophrenia, which pose a significant barrier to achieving functional goals. The most promising intervention for treating cognitive impairment is cognitive remediation (CR), a behaviorally based therapy associated with medium effect sizes for cognitive and functional outcomes. However, there is a sizeable group of nonresponders whose CR outcomes become limited when the therapeutic approach fails to address individual differences in baseline cognition, motivation variables, and the extent to which CR offers opportunities for generalization. This speaks to a need to develop cognitive interventions that are both personalized and scalable. Emerging data suggest that specific pharmacological agents have the potential to enhance and accelerate behaviorally based CR effects. This article will review the rationale and preliminary evidence to support combining CR and pharmacotherapy. We will review crucial aspects of cognitive interventions that offer the most promise for improving not only cognitive outcomes, but also for enhancing improvement in real-world functioning. Finally, we will address methodological issues to be considered for future research on combined pharmacological and CR interventions.

We appear to be on the brink of a new epoch of treatment for Alzheimer's disease. Compelling evidence suggests that Aβ secretion is the triggering event in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease, and that tau aggregation may be an important secondary event linked to neurodegeneration. Prophylactic administration of anti-amyloid agents designed to prevent Aβ accumulation in persons with subclinical disease is likely to be more effective than therapeutic interventions in established Alzheimer's disease. Drug development programs in Alzheimer's disease focus primarily on agents with anti-amyloid disease-modifying properties, and many different pharmacologic approaches to reducing amyloid pathology and tauopathy are being studied. Classes of therapeutic modalities currently in advanced-stage clinical trial testing include forms of immunotherapy (active β-amyloid immunoconjugate and human intravenous immunoglobulin), a γ-secretase inhibitor, the selective Aβ42-lowering agent R-flurbiprofen, and the anti-aggregation agent tramiprosate. Non-traditional dementia therapies such as the HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors (statins), valproate, and lithium are now being assessed for clinical benefit as anti-amyloid disease-modifying treatments. Positive findings of efficacy and safety from clinical studies are necessary but not sufficient to demonstrate that a drug has disease-modifying properties. Definitive proof of disease-modification requires evidence from validated animal models of Alzheimer's disease; rigorously controlled clinical trials showing a significantly improved, stabilized, or slowed rate of decline in cognitive and global function compared to placebo; and prospectively obtained evidence from surrogate biomarkers that the treatment resulted in measurable biological changes associated with the underlying disease process.

Moving from a behavioral-based to a biological-based classification of mental disorders is a crucial step toward a precision-medicine approach in psychiatry. In the last decade, a big effort has been made in order to stratify genetic, immunological, neurobiological, cognitive, and clinical profiles of patients. Making the case of obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD), a lot have been made in this direction. Indeed, while the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) diagnosis of OCD aimed to delineate a homogeneous group of patients, it is now clear that OCD is instead an heterogeneous disorders both in terms of neural networks, immunological, genetic, and clinical profiles. In this view, a convergent amount of literature, in the last years, indicated that OCD patients with an early age at onset seem to have a specific clinical and biological profile, suggesting it as a neurodevelopmental disorder. Also, these patients tend to have a worse outcome respect to adult-onset patients and there is growing evidence that early-interventions could potentially improve their prognosis. Therefore, the aim of the present paper is to review the current available genetic, immunological, neurobiological, cognitive, and clinical data in favor of a more biologically precise subtype of OCD: the early-onset subtype. We also briefly resume current available recommendations for the clinical management of this specific population.

Two decades of research into problematic Internet use have not yielded an established definition, much less an accepted treatment algorithm that is based on the psychopharmacological and psychotherapeutic interventions that have been tested. Meanwhile, technology-mediated tools that purport to curb unnecessary use of Internet-related technologies and the associated negative consequences are gaining in popularity, despite the lack of rigorous clinical trials into their efficacy and safety. Some popular new offerings that vary in browser, operating system and platform compatibility are reviewed. While they share similar goals as “traditional” treatments, they may be more efficient, scalable, and affordable. Using technology against itself may be counter-intuitive, but the popularity of these tools and their potential advantages make them worthy of researchers’ attention. Telepsychiatry platforms, which are gaining a foothold in the treatment of established disorders, may, paradoxically, also prove beneficial for the management of problematic use of Internet-related technologies.