Predicting Suicide Attempts for Racial and Ethnic Groups of Patients During Routine Clinical Care

The aim of this study was to examine variation in suicide ideation and its relationship to risk of suicide attempt in the subsequent 90 days by race and ethnicity. Participants were adults who completed the Patient Health Questionnaire depression module (PHQ9) during an outpatient encounter between January 10, 2010, and December 12, 2012 (N = 509,945 patients; N = 1,228,308 completed PHQ9). Data came from the Virtual Data Warehouse from four health care systems in the Mental Health Research Network. The sample was majority female (73.7%), primarily 30–64 years old (60.1%), healthy (64.5% comorbidity index = 0), and over half were non‐Hispanic White (52.9%). Only Asian patients (OR: 1.31; 95% CI: 1.24, 1.39) had higher odds of reporting suicide ideation when compared to non‐Hispanic White people. All racial and ethnic groups had increased risk for suicide attempt with increased frequency of suicide ideation. The PHQ9 item 9 can be used as an indicator of suicide ideation and risk for suicide attempt up to 90 days after the reported ideation in racial and ethnic minority patients during routine clinical care.     

BRIEF REPORT

The aim of this study was to explore the impact of quantifiers on depressed future thinking. Universal quantifiers, such as all and none, express bleak expectations and their global nature suggests no alternatives or exceptions (e.g., “ None of the future will be happy; all of it will be bleak”). We hypothesised that less extreme quantifiers would access alternative future perspectives. Depressed participants with high levels of hopelessness generated continuations to sentence stems that quantified different amounts of future time. Averaging over conditions, the depressed were more negative than never-depressed controls, but differences were attenuated in response to the quantifier some —the depressed were more positive and less negative under this condition (e.g., “ Some of the future…will be good”). By differentiating subsets of the future, some produced contrasts with negative global models and accessed positive alternatives.     

The predictive moment: reverie,connection and predictive processing

ABSTRACT

According to the theory of predictive processing, understanding in the present involves non-consciously representing the immediate future, based on probabilistic inference shaped by learning from the past. This paper suggests links between this neuroscientific theory and the psychoanalytic concept of reverie – an empathic, containing attentional state – and considers implications for the ways therapists intuit implicit material in their clients. Using findings from a study about therapists’ experiences of this state, we propose that reverie can offer practitioners from diverse theoretical backgrounds a means to enter the predictive moment deeply, making use of its subtle contents to connect with clients.     

Evaluation of The Practitioner Online Referral and Treatment Service (PORTS): the first 18 months of a state-wide digital service for adults with anxiety,depression, or substance use problems

ABSTRACT

The Practitioner Online Referral and Treatment Service (PORTS) is a new digital mental health service (DMHS) providing assessment, treatment, and consultation across Western Australia, for adults with anxiety, depression, or substance use problems, and experiencing financial hardship or geographical disadvantage. From July 2017 to December 2018, a total of 2,527 individuals were referred to PORTS. Of these, 150 (6%) did not give consent for their results to be analysed. Of the remaining 2,377 patients, 615 (26%) could not be contacted to confirm the referral, 596 (25%) received assessment or information from PORTS, 427 (18%) were referred to another service, and 739 (31%) commenced treatment at PORTS. Almost half (47%) of patients were from areas with significant socio-economic disadvantage. Those referred by another mental health service were more likely to engage in treatment than those referred by a General Practitioner (GP). Overall outcomes were excellent, with large effect sizes (Cohen’s d: 1.1–1.4), from assessment to post-treatment and 3-month follow-up, reliable deterioration was low, and GP and patient satisfaction was high. These results indicate that the PORTS DMHS model is a promising method for engaging primary care patients with anxiety and depression, including those experiencing financial and geographical disadvantage.     

Comprehension of algebraic expressions by experienced users of mathematics

Little is known about how people comprehend mathematical expressions. In the present study we investigate the internal representations used by experienced users of mathematics to encode algebraic expressions. Initially, a memory recognition task was conducted that examined the role of mathematical syntax in the encoding of algebraic expressions. The results indicate that participants could more readily identify those parts of a previously seen expression that were syntactically well formed than those that were not well formed, suggesting that syntax plays an important role. To determine the level of syntactic structure involved, a second recognition task was conducted. The results indicate that algebraic expressions are encoded into components that represent the phrasal constituents of the expression. However, the results of these experiments did not rule out the possibility that the visual processes of perceptual organization were used to encode the expressions, or that the data were a consequence of a mathematical “lexicon” of common mathematical “phrases”. Three further experiments were conducted to examine this, the results of which indicate that the encoding of algebraic expressions is based primarily on processes that occur beyond the level of visual or “lexical” processing. This is consistent with our finding that syntactic structure plays a key role.