The use of information systems and computer science applications in the health sector is now entrenched and widespread. In mental health services there are the typical applications of information systems concerning administrative, clinical and research issues, as well as innovative applications concerning diagnostic procedures, self-help, communication and delivery of psychotherapy.

The aim of this Editorial is to describe the association between child sexual abuse and psychosis, and to consider potential mechanisms for the association. The association is strongly supported by the literature. Evidence from a variety of sources is triangulated in order to create a plausible model of the link, which can then be used to direct future research. The mechanisms are certainly complex, and there is evidence of interacting contributions at genetic, neurophysiological, behavioural, cognitive and emotional levels. Child sexual abuse is an important antecedent in psychosis, both theoretically and clinically. At the theoretical level, it potentially illuminates mechanisms by which psychotic symptoms are generated, at the clinical level it opens possibilities for improving cognitive-behavioural approaches to treatment.

Declaration of Interest: None.

Psychosis is thought to have a strong genetic component, but many efforts to discover the underlying putative schizophrenia genes have yielded disappointing results. In fact, no strong associations emerged in the first genome-wide association studies in psychiatry and weakly observed associations were not related to the candidate genes identified in previous studies. These partially successful findings may be explained by the fact that genetic research in psychiatry suffers from confounding issues related to phenotype definition, the considerable degree of phenotypic variability and diagnostic uncertainty, absence of specific neuropathological features and environmental influences. To make progress it is first necessary to deconstruct psychosis based on symptomatology, and then to correlate particular phenotypes with genetic variants. Moreover, it is time to conduct studies that define persistent aspects of the schizophrenic profile that are more likely to represent an underlying biological pathogenesis, as opposed to fluctuating symptoms that are possibly environmentally mediated. In fact, progress in understanding the etiology of schizophrenia will depend upon the availability of good measures of genetic liability as well as relevant environmental exposures during critical periods of an individual's life. If environmental and/or genetic factors are not precisely measured, it is impossible to study their independent effects or interactions.

The potential role of psychopharmacology in suicide prevention is often minimised. This may to some extent reflect that few medication trials have specifically focussed on prevention of suicidal behaviour – indeed this outcome is often not reported in trials. However, there is reasonably strong evidence that lithium may reduce risk of suicide, the postulated mechanism being a specific effect on aggression. Evidence is lacking with regard to any protective effect of other mood stabilizers. Clozapine may reduce suicidal behaviour in patients with schizophrenia, with reduction of affective symptoms being a possible explanation. The role of antidepressants in relation to suicide risk is highly controversial, especially in children and adolescents. It is unclear whether minor tranquillizers or hypnotics can assist in suicide prevention, although they can reduce the anxiety symptoms that may occur during initial treatment with SSRI antidepressants. Itis also uncertain whether psychopharmacology has a role in preventing suicidal behaviour in people with personality disorders. Despite the limitations of the evidence we contend that suicide risk should be an important factor in deciding when and what to prescribe.

Declaration of Interest: We have no interests to declare.

There is ever-increasing activity in applying information technology to various areas of healthcare, including mental health. Examples of innovations include applications in screening, treatment, clinical decision support, communication and coordination, telemedicine, Internet-based education and services, public health research, training and education, and bioinformatics. Issues and challenges include protection of privacy, managing narrative free text, assessing the reliability of information found online, and mitigating impact on clinical workflow. While many of the innovations described will not be fully realized until national information systems reach a larger scale, many are having a positive impact on mental healthcare today.

We reviewed available research findings, including meta-analyses on effects of lithium-treatment associated with rates of suicidal behavior in bipolar disorder or unipolar major depressive disorder patients, and for comparisons of lithium to mood-stabilizing anticonvulsants. Data from meta-analyses consistently indicate marked reductions of suicidal behavior and mortality during long-term treatment with lithium salts in bipolar disorder patients, and possibly also in unipolar, recurrent major depressive, perhaps even more effectively than with anticonvulsants proposed as mood-stabilizers. Suicidal risk is frequently associated with dysphoric-agitated symptoms, anger, aggression, and impulsivity-all of which may respond better to treatment with lithium or other mood-stabilizing medicines than to antidepressants. In these conditions, antidepressant treatment may not provide a beneficial effect on risk of suicidal thoughts and perhaps attempts, particularly in juveniles, whereas, lithium, perhaps even more than anticonvulsants, seems to be remarkably effective in the preventing suicidal behavior. The mechanism of action is not well defined and may be associated with either a prevention of mood recurrences or a more specific “antisuicidal” activity.

Declaration of Interest: Dr. Tondo has received research support from Janssen and Eli Lilly Corporations and has served as a consultant to Glaxo-SmithKline and Merck Corporations. Dr. Baldessarini has recently been a consultant or investigator-initiated research collaborator with: AstraZeneca, Auritec, Biotrofix, Janssen, JDS-Noven, Lilly, Luitpold, NeuroHealing, Novartis, Pfizer, and SK-BioPharmaceutical Corporations. Neither author is a member of pharmaceutical speakers’ bureaus, nor do they or any family member hold equity positions in biomedical or pharmaceutical corporations.

Recent genome-wide association studies in schizophrenia have provided strongest evidence for association and this strengthened when the affected phenotype included bipolar disorder suggesting that genes may not always associate with operationalised diagnostic entities. Several further large Genome Wide Association (GWA) studies on schizophrenia are under way and identified and replicated further loci in well-powered cohorts. The last 2 years have also witnessed an explosion of interest in human Copy Number Variants (CNVs). Deletions recently identified in schizophrenia (1q21.1; 2p16.3; 15q11.2; 15q13.3) have also been most recently found in further neurodevelopmental diseases. Thus, a significant fraction of individuals with neurodevelopmental diseases including schizophrenia carry CNVs and many will be defined as “genomic disorders” in the coming years. These findings could represent a decisive step towards understanding the causes of this severe mental disorder as well as developing new potential treatments. There is new hope that these new avenues will help understanding the neurobiology of schizophrenia in more depth leading to the development of new innovative diagnostic tools and therapies as was the case after the discovery of rare APP and presenilin 1 and 2 mutations in Alzheimer's disease.

This editorial reviews the relationship between childhood trauma and the development of psychosis in adulthood. There are numerous studies, including large, prospective studies, which clearly support a link between childhood adversity and experience of psychosis later in life. There is also evidence that there is a dose response relationship, and that childhood trauma is particularly associated with the experience of hallucinations and delusional ideas. It is possible that psychosis is a relatively understandable response to the experience of severe trauma, and recent cognitive models of psychosis can help to explain the underlying mechanisms in such a causal relationship. There are obvious treatment implications, which include the need to assess histories of childhood trauma in people with psychosis, the incorporation of trauma in shared understandings of psychosis with service users, the incorporation of change strategies in cognitive behaviour therapy for psychosis that are derived from evidence-based approaches to the treatment of trauma and PTSD, and the prevention of traumatisation by mental health services.

Declaration of Interest: None.

The aims are to examine the challenges and opportunities in the implementation of mental health information systems (MHIS) in developing countries as suggested by the World Health Organization (WHO) and explored by Gulbinat et al. (2008). Special recommendations for developing countries are: 1) MHIS should be linked to the general medical information system; 2) there is need for adoption, adaptation and validation of preferably self-administered instruments that are appropriate for different levels within the health care system; 3) developing countries must adopt innovative and “unconventional” approaches through utilization of community members, traditional doctors/healers and mid-cadre health workers, in addition to general doctors, for the delivery of mental health services.

Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) are designed and powered to measure one single outcome, called primary outcome (Sibbald & Roland, 1998; Barbui et al., 2007). The primary outcome is the pre-specified outcome of greatest clinical importance and is usually the one used in the sample size calculation (Accordini, 2007). In addition to the primary outcome, RCTs may have several other outcomes, called secondary outcomes. In contrast with the analysis of the primary outcome, the analysis of secondary outcomes and its interpretation may be complicated by at least two factors:

1. 1) the trial may not have enough statistical power to detect differences (so it is possible to incur in a type II error, that is failing to see a difference that is present);

2. 2) increasing the number of secondary outcomes generates the problem of multiplicity of analyses, that is the proliferation of possible comparisons in a trial (and increasing the number of comparisons increases the possibility to incur in a type I error, that is detecting significant differences by chance). For all these reasons, the results of the analysis of primary outcomes is considered less susceptible to bias than the analysis of secondary outcomes.

Self-injurious and suicidal behaviours are highly prevalent in patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) and the risk of completed suicide is high. Borderline patients often present with heterogeneous clinical pictures and widespread comor-bidity complicating clinical assessments and management. This calls for increased efforts in systematic evaluation and monitoring of self-harming and suicidal behaviours; these behaviours should be addressed actively as high priority treatment targets. Early drop-out is common for BPD patients in treatment but is possible to counteract by fostering a strong therapeutic relationship through adopting a realistic, but consistent and supportive approach carefully avoiding reinforcement of suicidal behaviours. Suicidal crises should primarily be managed in an outpatient setting giving priority to keeping the patient safe adopting a safety plan procedure, while helping the patient as quickly as possible to return emotionally to a more acceptable level of arousal and mental functioning. Pharmacological treatments should primarily be used for management of comorbid conditions, but may possibly also be helpful when used to reduce specific symptoms such as anger, hostility and impulsivity. There is currently a range of different integrated short-term and long-term psychological treatments in different stages of development and some of them have been shown to be efficacious in reducing suicidal behaviours; notably dialectical behaviour therapy and mentalization-based therapy.

Declaration of Interest: None.

The eating disorders anorexia and bulimia nervosa have traditionally been regarded as entirely separate from obesity. Eating disorders have been regarded as Western culture-bound syndromes, arising in societies with excessive emphasis on weight, shape and appearance, and best treated by psychological therapies, in particular cognitive behavioural therapy or familybased interventions. In contrast, obesity has been considered a medical illness with metabolic and genetic origins, and thought to be best treated by mainstream medicine, involving dietary, drug or surgical treatment. We believe that this polarisation is fundamentally flawed, and research and treatment of both types of disorder would be better served by greater appreciation of the psychosocial components of obesity and the biological and genetic components of eating disorders. There are similarities in phenotype (such as excessive attempts at weight control, binge eating behaviours) and in risk factors (such as low self-esteem, external locus of control, childhood abuse and neglect, dieting, media exposure, body image dissatisfaction, weight-related teasing and shared susceptibility genes). One example of shared genetic risk is the brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BNDF) gene, in which the valine allele of the Va166Met amino acid polymorphism predisposes to obesity, whereas the methionine allele predisposes to eating disorders. Thus the evidence suggests that these disorders will have both shared and distinct susceptibility factors; some will predispose to both types of disorder, some will push in opposite directions, and some will separate them.

Mental health services and research have been dominated for several decades by a rather simplistic, reductionistic focus on biological phenomena, with minimal consideration of the social context within which genes and brains inevitably operate. This ‘medical model’ ideology, enthusiastically supported by the pharmaceutical industry, has been particularly powerful in the field of psychosis, where it has led to unjustified and damaging pessimism about recovery. The failure to find robust evidence of a genetic predisposition for psychosis in general, or ‘schizophrenia’ in particular, can be understood in terms of recently developed knowledge about how epigenetic processes turn gene transcription on and off through mechanisms that are highly influenced by the individual's socio-environmental experiences. To understand the emerging evidence of the relationship between adverse childhood events and subsequent psychosis, it is necessary to integrate these epigenetic processes, especially those involving the stress regulating functions of the HPA axis, with research about the psychological mechanisms by which specific types of childhood trauma can lead to specific types of psychotic experiences. The implications, for research, mental health services and primary prevention, are profound.

Declaration of Interest: None of the authors have any conflicts of interest in relation to this paper.

The corpus callosum (CC) is the brain's largest white matter tract, mostly composed by both myelinated and unmyelinated fibres, connecting the two cerebral hemispheres. The CC can be divided into different sections: rostrum, genu, body, isthmus and splenium (Aboitiz et al., 1992). Myelinated fibres predominate in the midbody and the splenium while unmyelinated fibres are more numerous in the rostrum and the genu. The callosal fiber disposition approximately reflects brain topography: the anterior sections connect the frontal lobes, the median sections connect temporal and parietal regions, and the posterior sections link occipital areas (Pandya et al., 1971). This traditional picture, however, which has been obtained mainly through studies in non-human primates has been partly modified by modern diffusion tensor imaging studies in humans (Hofer & Frahm, 2006). The CC matures after birth through adolescence and into early adulthood and is involved in different cognitive processes such as sensory-motor integration, attention, language, arousal and memory. Its size has been shown to be associated with handedness, sex (i.e., greater splenium in females and greater genu in males, Dubb et al., 2003) and cerebral laterality (i.e., inverse correlation between callosal connectivity and brain lateralization in males; Luders et al., 2003), and age (Ota et al., 2006) Specifically, age-related callosal degeneration has been detected by a diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) study (Ota et al., 2006) in the sub-regions that connect areas which are thought to be vulnerable to normal aging: the genu, rostral body, and isthmus. This result replicated post mortem findings of callosal degeneration in rostral body, anterior midbody and isthmus (Aboitiz et al., 1996).

In randomised controlled trials (RCTs) there are two types of validity: internal validity and external validity. Internal validity refers to the extent to which the observed difference between groups can be correctly attributed to the intervention under investigation. In other words, it is the extent to which the design and conduct of the trial eliminate error. Internal validity might be threatened by two types of errors: systematic error (also called bias) and chance error (also called random error or statistical error) (Keirse & Hanssens, 2000. Systematic error, or bias, may be the consequence of erroneous ways of collecting, analysing and interpreting data. This may produce differences between treatments that are not real, with an overestimation or an underestimation of the true beneficial or harmful effect of an intervention (Juni et al., 2001). In RCTs there are four types of bias: selection bias (when the groups differ in baseline characteristics because of the way participants are selected), performance bias (when the care provided to the trial participants differs systematically between the experimental and control group), detection bias (when there are systematic differences in outcome assessment), and attrition bias (when the loss of participants from the study systematically differs between the experimental and control group). By contrast, chance error, or statistical error, is due to outcome variability that may arise by chance alone. Studies with small sample sizes are more likely to incur in this type of error than studies with large sample sizes. Thus, the risk of random error may be minimised by recruiting sufficiently large samples of patients.

One of the most important critical decision to be taken when designing a randomized controlled trial (RCT) in clinical psychopharmacology is the choice of the comparator. This choice is crucial because it affects many issues related to both internal and external validity. The aim of a RCT may be to establish efficacy in absolute terms, against an inert treatment (usually a placebo), or to establish efficacy with respect to another treatment (also known as comparator), a trial may be designed to demonstrate that the new drug is superior to the control intervention or, by contrast, that the new drug is similar to the control intervention in terms of, say, symptoms' reduction. Three kinds of RCTs may be designed: Superiority trials, Equivalence studies, Non-inferiority studies.