Camden and Islington NHS Foundation Trust

Mental Health Current Awareness Bulletin 01 December 2013

Keeping up to date with what is happening in your profession can be both time consuming and a bit of a minefield.

To help you maintain your awareness the library produces a monthly mental health current awareness bulletin which reflects the main stories, guidance priorities and research within the profession. It is featured on the library page of the Whittington Health Intranet, is soon to be present on the Camden and Islington Intranet and can be found on the Whittington Health Library webpage.

For those who prefer the bulletin to be delivered direct to their inbox, we also offer an emailing service. Please contact Catherine Wardle: catherinewardle@nhs.net for more details.

In addition to offering this service, we can also advise on setting up email alerts, journal table of contents alerts and RSS feeds to help you keep abreast of what’s new from various health information sources.

Do contact Catherine if  you require any assistance with accessing journals, links, resources or setting up an NHS Athens account.

News

Overlooked and forgotten - Full report [PDF]

A report by the Children & Young People’s Mental Health Coalition reveals that 2 in 3 joint strategic needs assessments (JSNAs) do not specifically address children and young people’s mental health. Furthermore, data most commonly used to estimate the prevalence of mental health need is almost a decade old.

'Determination' can be induced by electrical brain stimulation – The Guardian

Applying an electric current to a particular part of the brain makes people feel a sense of determination, say researchers. Doctors in the US have induced feelings of intense determination in two men by stimulating a part of their brains with gentle electric currents. The remarkable findings could help researchers develop treatments for depression and other disorders where people are debilitated by a lack of motivation.

Drug may help Parkinson's disease psychosis – NHS Choices

Many common antipsychotic drugs target the dopamine system, and if given to patients with Parkinson’s can make the physical symptoms of the condition, such as tremor, worse. This news is based on a study into a new antipsychotic drug called Pimavanserin, which targets a different signaling system (the serotonin system). It found that psychotic symptom scores in people with Parkinson’s improved significantly when given Pimavanserin compared to placebo ("dummy treatment").

Guidance

NICE Guidelines: Smoking cessation in secondary care: acute, maternity and mental health services [PDF]

Over 40% of all cigarettes smoked in England are smoked by people with severe mental illnesses. This group are more likely to become physically ill than the rest of the population, but they are less likely to be given help to quit. New public health guidance from NICE out this month looks to tackle these issues by helping people using acute, maternity and mental health services to stop smoking.

CQC: A fresh start for the regulation and inspection of mental health services [PDF]

Professor Sir Mike Richards, CQC’s Chief Inspector of Hospitals, said: “The needs of people with mental health problems run through all the areas that CQC regulates and we have recognised that we need to strengthen our approach to regulating specialist mental health services to ensure that people get care that is safe, effective, caring, responsive to people’s needs and well led. I regard this as every bit as important as the changes I am making to the way we regulate acute hospitals.”  

Evidence

Articles:

Gabapentin Treatment for Alcohol Dependence:  A Randomized Clinical Trial. Barbara J. Mason, et al. November 04, 2013 *Accessible via your Athens username and password – Click here to search and access this journal

The drug Gabapentin is licensed for the treatment of epileptic seizures, and it works by modulating GABA (gamma-Aminobutyric acid) activity in the brain. The drug may also be an effective treatment for alcohol dependence. This is because patients report depressed mood, craving, and sleep disturbance as they go through alcohol withdrawal. This study aimed to overcome the limitations of previous trials, by testing two doses of the drug against a placebo in a large sample of alcohol-dependent patients.

Community Participation and Belonging Among Formerly Homeless Adults with Mental Illness After 12 months of Housing First in Vancouver, British Columbia: A Randomized Controlled Trial. Michelle L. Patterson, et al. Community Mental Health Journal, December 2013 *Some access via Athens but not to the current issues. For a copy of this article visit the library catalogue, log in and fill out the Inter library Loan request form. You should have it emailed to you within 48 hours.

This study examines community integration among homeless adults with mental illness 6 and 12 months after random assignment to Housing First (independent apartments or congregate residence) with support services or to treatment as usual (TAU).

Pro re nata (PRN) or ‘as required’ medication is a commonly used intervention for nursing staff when they are concerned about patients’ safety and their levels of distress. However, studies have shown that nurses tend to resort to PRN medication as a first resort, rather than a last resort. It has been suggested that encouraging behavioural approaches as an alternative to medication can avoid a reliance on psychotropic PRN medication.

Synaesthesia may be ‘more common’ in autism. Baron Cohen, Simon et al. Molecular Autism 2013, 4:40 *Accessible via your Athens username and password – Click here to search and access this journal 
 

Synaesthesia is a condition where experiencing one sensation in one of the senses, such as hearing, involuntarily triggers another sensation in another sense, such as taste. The researchers explain that Synaesthesia has been estimated to affect around 4% of the population and autism 1% of the population. If the two phenomena were completely independent, you'd expect to see the same prevalence of Synaesthesia in people with and without autism. However, this study, which involved screening people with and without autism for Synaesthesia, showed this may not be the case. In adults with autism, the prevalence of Synaesthesia was estimated to be 18.9%, whereas adults without autism had a much lower prevalence of 7.21%.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Meditation Awareness Training (MAT) for the Treatment of Co-occurring Schizophrenia and Pathological Gambling: A Case Study Edo Shonin, et al. International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction December 2013  * Not accessible via Athens. For a copy of this article visit the library catalogue, log in and fill out the Inter library Loan request form. You should have it emailed to you within 48 hours.

There is a paucity of interventional approaches that are sensitive to the complex needs of individuals with co-occurring schizophrenia and pathological gambling. Utilizing a single-participant design, this study conducted the first clinical evaluation of a novel and integrated non-pharmacological treatment for a participant with dual-diagnosis schizophrenia and pathological gambling

Cochrane Systematic Reviews:

Mass media interventions for reducing mental health-related stigma. Clement S, et al. 2013

“Anti-stigma campaigns often include mass media interventions, and can be expensive, so it is important to find out if the use of mass media interventions can reduce stigma. We reviewed studies comparing people who saw or heard a mass media intervention about mental health problems with people who had not seen or heard any intervention, or who had seen an intervention which contained nothing about mental ill health or stigma. We aimed to find out what effects mass media interventions may have on reducing stigma towards people with mental health problems.”

Consumer-providers of care for adult clients of statutory mental health services. Pitt V, et al. 2013

“Past or present consumers of mental health services can work in partnership with mental health professionals in 'consumer-provider' roles, when providing mental health services to others. Their roles may include peer support, coaching, advocacy, specialists or peer interviewers, case management or outreach, crisis worker or assertive community treatment worker, or providing social support programmes. Until now, the effects of employing past or present consumers of mental health services, in providing services to adult clients of these services, have not been assessed rigorously.”

Collaborative care approaches for people with severe mental illness. Reilly, Siobahn et al. 2013

“Collaborative care aims to improve the physical and mental health of people with severe mental illness (SMI). Common to all definitions is that collaborative care aims to develop closer working relationships between primary care (family doctors or GPs and practice nurses) and specialist health care (such as Community Mental Health Teams). There are different ways in which this can be achieved, making collaborative care very complex. The aim of the review was to assess the effectiveness of collaborative care in comparison to standard or usual care.” 

“People with depression are very often heavy smokers. We wanted to know whether treatments to help people quit smoking are effective for people with current depression or with a history of depression. In this review, treatments were divided into those with or without specific attention to handling depression. We found that smoking cessation treatments with specific attention to handling depression helped smokers who suffered from depression to quit. Psychosocial 'mood management' interventions, where participants learn how to handle depressive symptoms with psychological techniques, were effective in those with current depression and with a history of it.”