Mental health therapy for refugee and asylum seeking children: a small evidence base for a big problem

Refugees face a substantially higher risk of psychotic disorders compared to non-refugee migrants [see previous blog].

Laurence Palfreyman considers the very small and mixed evidence base of mental health interventions for refugee and asylum seeking children presented in a well conducted systematic review from last year.

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Coproduction of secure mental health services: design, development and delivery

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Sarah Carr summarises a study of user involvement and coproduction initiatives in secure mental health settings, which recommends schemes that build alliances, garner mutual respect and support communication between staff and service users in shared forums.

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How do you keep up to date with reliable research? #WeNurses tweet chat summary

WeNurses

André Tomlin summarises the WeNurses tweet chat that he ran with Teresa Chinn on 11/12/14. The chat saw contributions from a diverse group of 96 people who discussed the barriers to keeping up to date with reliable research, literature searching, critical appraisal, Twitter journal clubs and much more.

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How can we improve mental health services for young people? Ask them

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Sarah Knowles appraises and summarises a thematic analysis of young people’s views of UK mental health services, which calls for greater involvement of young people themselves in redesigning services to be more engaging and accessible.

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Medication for the maintenance treatment of bipolar disorder

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Elena Marcus summarises a recent network meta-analysis published in The Lancet of the comparative efficacy and tolerability of medication for the maintenance treatment of bipolar disorder.

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Mental health support for older adults needs to improve

Previous research shows that low education, hypertension, smoking and diabetes may all have causal associations with dementia.

Dave Steele summarises an NIHR funded mixed methods study that concludes we don’t know much about how we should support older adults with mental health problems, except to say that we should be doing better.

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The Internet Therapist: adherence to Internet CBT compared to face to face CBT

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Andrés Fonseca appraises a recent meta-analysis of adherence to Internet CBT and face-to-face cognitive behavioural therapy for depression.

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Folic acid for depression: RCT finds no effect on reducing incidence of depression or bipolar

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Elly O’Brien summarises a recent RCT of folic acid for depression, which explores whether mood disorders can be prevented in young people at familial risk. The trial finds no evidence that folic acid supplementation reduces the incidence of mood disorders compared to those taking placebo.

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Joint Crisis Plans: empowering service users with psychotic disorders

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Raphael Underwood reports on a thematic analysis of joint crisis plans, which explores what service users with psychotic disorders want in a mental health crisis or relapse.

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Internet-based CBT for chronic somatic conditions: problematic meta-analysis offers an overly enthusiastic appraisal

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Ioana Cristea critically reviews a recent meta-analysis of Internet-based CBT for patients with chronic somatic conditions. She concludes that the review authors are offering an overly positive interpretation of their results, and that we need more high quality studies before we can recommend online cognitive behaviour therapy for this population.

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