Encephale
-
For schizophrenic disorders, the clinical conception of "acute state" is widely used in clinical settings to assess the effectiveness of therapeutic programs as well as epidemiological studies. Schizophrenic-specific symptomatology modification, need for hospitalization, significant change in care, disturbances in social behavior or suicide attempts were all used to define acute schizophrenic state. The decision to hospitalize is frequently used to define acute state but refers to multiple factors such as mood disorder, suicide attempts, drug abuse or social and environmental problems. ⋯ Hallucinatory behavior is the first symptom rated in definition and is considered by psychiatrists as the absolute therapeutic priority. This survey could be a first step in the construction of an operational and consensual definition. This definition is strongly needed as a valid measurement in therapeutic and epidemiological outcome studies, which remain at least partly based on clinician subjective judgment.
-
This article reviews studies concerning unawareness of deficits in Alzheimer's disease. Unawareness of the deficits associated with dementia has frequently been reported in clinical descriptions of the later stages of the disease. Consistent with the literature, we shall use the expressions impaired awareness, unawareness of deficits, anosognosia, and lack of insight interchangeably. ⋯ Environmental and dispositional components and an interactional view could be interesting. Those possible directions for future research and solutions concerning methodological and conceptual problems are outlined. In particular, a neuro-psycho-social view of unawareness is introduced.
-
Comparative Study
[The Fear of Negative Evaluation scale (FNE): psychometric properties of the French version].
The Fear of Negative Evaluation scale (FNE: Watson and Friend, 1969) is the measure most commonly used to determine the degree to which people experience apprehension at the prospect of being negatively evaluated. Although the development of the FNE preceded the inclusion of social anxiety disorder (or social phobia) in the diagnostic classification system, it is widely used as a measure of cognitive symptoms because the feature tapped by this measure is at the core of recent cognitive models of social-anxiety. According to these models, socially anxious individuals divide their attention between the internal representations of their social self (negative images and "felt sense") and external cues that could be taken as a sign of negative evaluation by others. The FNE was validated in a student and patient population in English speaking countries. The English version demonstrates adequate empirical validity. It shows excellent internal consistency and one-factor structure. Test retest reliability is satisfying. It is proved to be sensible to change after treatment. It is well correlated with other measures of social anxiety demonstrating good convergent validity. However, divergent and discriminate validity have been a subject of controversy. The aim of the present study was to assess the psychometric properties of the French version of the FNE in order to obtain a valid instrument measuring the cognitive component of social anxiety. ⋯ The present study shows that the French version of the FNE has good psychometric properties and differentiates social phobic patients from the non-clinical control subjects. Given the importance that models of social anxiety attribute to cognitive processes and the importance of cognitive techniques in its treatment, we consider that the French version of the FNE is an adequate and valid questionnaire to be used in research and therapy.
-
Depression is a frequent symptom in psychiatry, either isolated (major depression) or entangled with other psychiatric symptoms (psychotic depression, depression of bipolar disorders). Many antidepressant drugs are available with different pharmacological profiles from different classes: tricyclic antidepressants, monoamine oxydase inhibitors, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI). However, there are some limitations with these drugs because there is a long delay before relief for symptoms, some patients with major depression are resistant to treatment, there is a risk to induce manic symptoms in patients with bipolar disorders and these drugs have no effect on the psychotic symptoms frequently associated to major depression. ⋯ More comparative double-blind studies are required to confirm and to precise the antidepressant effects of atypical antipsychotics. Nevertheless, these studies suggest that atypical anti-psychotics could be of great value in depressive conditions reputed for their resistance to treatment with usual antidepressants. Particularly, new strategies emerge that combine atypical antipsychotics and antidepressants for greater efficacy and more rapid relief of depression symptoms.
-
The International Consortium of Psychiatric Epidemiology has confirmed the high comorbidity in community-drawn samples between substance use disorders and anxiety or depression. In the same way, associations between substance use and specific personality traits (such as novelty seeking, harm avoidance or antisocial personality) have also been extensively documented. Self-medication and social deviance are among the most commonly evoked explanatory models for these forms of comorbidity, and are based on findings that affective disorders and specific personality traits often precede the onset of substance use disorders. The self-medication model postulates that an individual chooses a specific substance according to its psychopharmacologic action on the given psychological state of the person. By contrast, the social deviance model posits that this form of comorbidity is due to the fact that persons consuming certain substances may have affective or personality characteristics that are more severe or more deviant than non-consumers (or than consumers of socially well-accepted substances). In this way, the individual does not use a particular substance to assuage pre-existing disorders but, due to a more deviant personality, is less influenced by social norms and may more easily turn to using illicit substances or to polyconsumption. However, a major limitation of the current scientific literature concerning tests of these models is that previous investigations have been based in overwhelming majority on clinical populations. The examination only of clinical samples renders difficult the identification of causal (or primary) risk factors for the emergence of substance use disorders from the potential consequences of substance use itself. The goal of the current study was therefore to simultaneously compare both models of association using a non clinical population of substance users. In addition to selecting subjects based on use (rather than abuse or dependence), multiple comparisons were corrected with a Bonferroni adjustment. ⋯ The results obtained in this non-clinical sample are in favor of social deviance model which posits that the personality trait of novelty seeking is associated to the consumption of the most illicit and deviant substances (such as heroin or cocaine). On the other hand, no support was found for the hypothesis of self-medication which assumes that specific substances should be particularly associated with specific psychological characteristics or vulnerabilities.