Faculty Bibliography

Background/UNASSIGNED:United Nations (UN) personnel address a diverse range of political, social, and cultural crises throughout the world. Compared with other occupations routinely exposed to traumatic stress, there remains a paucity of research on mental health disorders and access to mental healthcare in this population. To fill this gap, personnel from UN agencies were surveyed for mental health disorders and mental healthcare utilization. Methods/UNASSIGNED:= 17 363) from 11 UN entities completed online measures of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), major depressive disorder (MDD), posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), trauma exposure, mental healthcare usage, and socio-demographic information. Results/UNASSIGNED:Exposure to one or more traumatic events was reported by 36.2% of survey responders. Additionally, 17.9% screened positive for GAD, 22.8% for MDD, and 19.9% for PTSD. Employing multivariable logistic regressions, low job satisfaction, younger age (<35 years of age), greater length of employment, and trauma exposure on or off-duty was significantly associated with all the three disorders. Among individuals screening positive for a mental health disorder, 2.05% sought mental health treatment within and 10.01% outside the UN in the past year. Conclusions/UNASSIGNED:UN personnel appear to be at high risk for trauma exposure and screening positive for a mental health disorder, yet a small percentage screening positive for mental health disorders sought treatment. Despite the mental health gaps observed in this study, additional research is needed, as these data reflect a large sample of convenience and it cannot be determined if the findings are representative of the UN.

Bipolar disorder can have serious effects on patients' social and occupational functioning. Effective pharmacotherapies are available, but many patients have difficulties adhering to prescribed regimens. This paper presents a cognitive-behavioral program designed to improve medication adherence. The program focuses on three goals: prevention of suicide, stabilization of mood, and achievement of individual personal and occupational goals. The treatment consists of behavioral, cognitive, and interpersonal interventions. Behavioral interventions include goal setting, task analysis, and self-monitoring. These interventions provide the framework for therapy and include methods for evaluating the effectiveness of the pharmacological treatment. Cognitive interventions are directed at the shame, defensiveness, and fear that can prevent patients from adhering to treatment recommendations. Interpersonal interventions provide the context in which the behavioral and cognitive interventions are implemented. Case examples illustrate key concepts

Quantitative descriptors of resting electroencephalogram (EEG) (QEEG) and event-related potentials (QERP) to visual and auditory stimuli were obtained from normal subjects and 94 chronic schizophrenic patients on medication, 25 chronic schizophrenics off medication, and 15 schizophrenics with no history of medication. These schizophrenic groups showed a high incidence of neurometric features that were significantly deviant from normative values. Multivariate discriminant analysis using these features successfully separated the schizophrenic patients from normals with high accuracy in independent replication. The data from the medicated group were subjected to cluster analysis. Newly developed algorithms were used for objective selection of the most effective set of variables for clustering and the optimum number of clusters to be sought. Five clusters were obtained, containing roughly equivalent proportions of the sample with markedly different QEEG profiles. The whole sample was then classified into these clusters. Each cluster contained patients both on and off medication, but patients who had never been medicated were classified into only three of these clusters. No significant clinical or demographic differences were found between members of the five clusters; however, clear differences in QERP profiles were seen. These results are described in detail and possible physiological and pharmacological implications are discussed

A relatively small but highly concordant literature suggests that manic depressive psychoses may include familial as well as nonfamilial subtypes. The latter, which appears to be an acquired form, follows brain injury of various etiology, displays EEG abnormalities and tends to respond well to anticonvulsant therapy. In this study we postulate an extension of this dichotomy to a larger spectrum of affective disorder, including milder but 'treatment resistant' forms often associated with a high degree of dysfunction. Central to this hypothesis is information gathered from the longitudinal study of a well defined case in which precise clinical and electrophysiological data have been obtained at critical junctures. This data also leads us to suggest the existence of a latent vulnerability to psychosocial stressors in a subgroup of minor head injured patients. Once triggered, the resulting psychopathological state may be clinically indistinguishable from similar but etiologically distinct conditions. However, they respond poorly, if at all, to the treatments usually effective for mood disorders, often causing puzzlement and frustration among clinicians as well as mounting hopelessness in patients. This organic mood disorder subtype, which can be described as 'neuro-sensitization mood disorder,' may be identified by combining a thorough history, including perinatal events and putative brain injury, with electrophysiological data consisting of quantitative EEG (QEEG) in association with evoked potentials. In cases with positive findings, anticonvulsants such as carbamazepine, clonazepam and valproic acid can be a treatment of choice

Current neuropsychological, electrophysiological, and other imaging data strongly suggest the existence of a neurobiological basis for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which was long considered to be exclusively of psychogenic origin. The positive response of some OCD patients to neurosurgery, as well as the efficacy of agents that selectively block serotonin reuptake, lends further support to a biological involvement. However, a survey of the treatment literature reveals that only 45-62% of OCD patients improve with these specific medications. In a pilot study using a quantitative electroencephalographic (QEEG) method known as neurometrics, in which QEEG data from OCD patients were compared statistically with those from an age-appropriate normative population, we previously reported the existence of two subtypes of OCD patients within a clinically homogeneous group of patients who met DSM-III-R criteria for OCD. Following pharmacological treatment, a clear relationship was found between treatment response and neurometric cluster membership. In this study, we have expanded the OCD population, adding patients from a second site, and have replicated the existence of two clusters of patients in an enlarged, statistically more robust population. Cluster 1 was characterized by excess relative power in theta, especially in the frontal and frontotemporal regions; cluster 2 was characterized by increased relative power in alpha. Further, 80.0% of the members of cluster 1 were found to be nonresponders to drug treatment, while 82.4% of the members of cluster 2 were found to be treatment responders.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)