Can we steer drug-using offenders away from crime and into treatment? Chris Sampson explores a study of the cost-effectiveness of diversion and aftercare programmes for offenders using class A drugs.
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Helge Hasselmann summarises a recent systematic review of poor oral health and severe mental illness (SMI), which found that people with SMI were 2.8 times more likely to have lost all their teeth, and had more missing, decayed or filled teeth.
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Beware underpowered observational studies! Marcus Munafò helps us understand why a recent BMJ study on all cause mortality and age specific alcohol consumption is not as simple as the newspapers would have us believe.
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Stephen Wood appraises the SEYLE cluster RCT that investigates the effectiveness of suicide prevention in schools. This is the first large-scale European study of universal interventions for suicide prevention in schools.
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Meg Fluharty highlights a recent study suggesting that financial incentives may be beneficial in helping pregnant women quit smoking. This recent study investigated the effectiveness of shopping vouchers in addition to NHS Stop Smoking Services to aid quit attempts in pregnant women.
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Vishal Bhavsar summarises a recent cross-sectional study of violent and non-violent crime against adults with severe mental illness, which finds that service users were five times more likely to be victims of assault, and three times more likely to be victims of household acquisitive crime.
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Ioana Cristea reviews a recent randomised controlled trial of cognitive bias modification to treat interpretation bias in adolescents. She argues that this new study adds weight to the ascertion that there are very limited, if any, mental health benefits for CBM interventions.
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Shirley Reynolds writes her debut Mental Elf blog on a recent meta-analysis of cognitive bias modification (CBM) for anxiety and depression in children and adolescents. The review suggests that, on the face of it, we should not be investing in future CBM research, but is it that simple?
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Patrick Kennedy-Williams highlights a recent opinion piece by Pim Cuijpers, which summarises what we know and what we don’t know about the efficacy of psychotherapies for adult depression.
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Andrew Shepherd summarises a recent systematic review of the effectiveness of psychotherapy for depression in primary care, which contains a lot of data but leaves him feeling rather deflated.
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