Disorders of thoughts and volition

INTRODUCTION: Suicide attempts and their consequences have been the leading causes of death among prisoners. Meta-analyses suggest that the main risk factors are current suicidal ideation, the presence of a mental disorder, high perceived stress levels, previous suicidal attempts or self-harm, and institutional and criminogenic variables. Empirical evidence is consistent with the integrated motivational-volitional model of suicidality, which also emphasizes the role of impulsivity in suicidal behaviour...

INTRODUCTION: While stigma toward autistic individuals has been well documented, less is known about how autism is perceived relative to other stigmatized disabilities. As a highly stigmatized condition with similar social cognitive features to autism, schizophrenia may offer a useful comparison for stigma. Previous studies have found that autistic people may be perceived more favorably than those with schizophrenia, but little is known about the underlying volitional thoughts that contribute to differences in how these conditions are perceived...

BACKGROUND: Suicidal Behaviors and Thoughts are a relevant public health issue that includes suicidal ideation, non-suicidal self-harm, attempted suicide, and failed suicides. Since there is a progression of suicidal behaviors, whereby suicide is more likely to be completed if there have already been previous behaviors or attempts to harm oneself, WHO has highlighted the need to detect early predictors of such suicidal behaviors, which can help identify individuals at risk, plan prevention strategies and implement specific therapeutic interventions, particularly in young people, thus reducing the number of deaths...

BACKGROUND: Individuals who self-harm have increased suicide rates. Brief interventions are associated with reduced repeated suicide attempts. However, very few previous studies investigated the acceptability of brief interventions before implementing new trials. AIMS: We aimed to explore the perceptions of individuals who self-harm toward a brief intervention, the Chinese version of the volitional help sheet (VHS-C), which encourages people to link a critical situation with an appropriate response...

BACKGROUND: Patients with schizophrenia present with both cognitive impairment as well as language difficulties. There are similarities in the language output of patients with schizophrenia and patients with aphasia, thus a differential diagnosis of patients who present with a question of dual diagnoses can be a clinical challenge. This case report highlights the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to a patient with schizophrenia who benefitted from intervention from both psychiatry and speech-language pathology services due to the patient's unique verbal output...

Malingering involves the intentional production of physical or psychological behaviors due to motivation from external incentives, posing unique challenges to healthcare. Although malingering as an entity has been well studied, the current literature does not explore the intentional production of catatonia-like behavior or how to differentiate malingering from catatonia. Here, we describe a 45-year-old female who was admitted to an acute psychiatric hospital with a complex presentation of catatonia-like signs that was ultimately thought to be volitional behavior, resulting in a diagnosis of malingering...

Lower urinary tract or voiding disorders are prevalent across all ages and affect over 40% of adults over 40 years old leading to decreased quality of life and high healthcare costs. The pontine micturition center (PMC; ie, Barrington's nucleus) contains a large population of neurons that localize the stress-related neuropeptide, corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH) and project to neurons in the spinal cord to regulate micturition. How the PMC and CRH-expressing neurons in the PMC control volitional micturition is of critical importance for human voiding disorders...

Bleuler suggested that fragmentation of thought, emotion and volition were the unifying feature of the disorders he termed schizophrenia. In this paper we review research seeking to measure some of the aspects of fragmentation related to the experience of the self and others described by Bleuler. We focus on work which uses the concept of metacognition to characterize and quantify alterations or decrements in the processes by which fragments or pieces of information are integrated into a coherent sense of self and others...

Novel psychoactive substances (NPSs) have currently become a major public health concern because of relatively easy accessibility to these compounds and difficulty in identifying them with routine laboratory techniques. Here, we report the 18 F-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography/computerized tomography (18 F-FDG PET/CT) case study of a 23-year-old man who developed a substance-induced psychotic disorder after having intravenously injected himself with an unspecified amount of methoxetamine (MXE), a ketamine derivative hallucinogen...

OBJECTIVES: Schizophrenia is a predominant product of pathological alterations distributed throughout interconnected neural systems. Designing new objectively diagnostic methods are burning questions. Dynamical functional connectivity (DFCs) methodology based on fMRI data is an effective lever to investigate changeability evolution in macroscopic neural activity patterns underlying critical aspects of cognition and behavior. However, region properties of brain architecture have been less investigated by special indexes of dynamical graph in general mental disorders...

Alienation, i. e. disorders of the inner experience of integrity, continuity, and agency, represents a feature of both psychotic and non-psychotic disorders. Thereby, ego disturbances are thought to be specific for schizophrenia. Depersonalisation, in contrast, has been reported in schizophrenia as well as a neurotic, probably distinct syndrome. The differentiation of psychotic vs. non-psychotic alienation is often all but trivial. The present paper provides an overview of the historical roots and the psychopathological conceptualizations of alienation...

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: This article summarizes findings from recent studies (published since 2015) examining differences between suicide attempters and suicide ideators. RECENT FINDINGS: Converging evidence suggests that the capability to attempt suicide (e.g., acquired capability, painful and provocative experiences, high tolerance for pain and distress) is higher in suicide attempters than suicide ideators. Other psychosocial and biological differences have also been identified but require replication...

IMPORTANCE: This article aims to determine the degree to which modern operationalized diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia reflect the main clinical features of the disorder as described historically by diagnostic experts. OBSERVATIONS: Amazon.com, the National Library of Medicine, and Forgottenbooks.com were searched for articles written or translated into English from 1900 to 1960. Clinical descriptions of schizophrenia or dementia praecox appearing in 16 textbooks or review articles published between 1899 and 1956 were reviewed and compared with the criteria for schizophrenia from 6 modern US operationalized diagnostic systems...

In anorexia nervosa (AN), volitional inhibition of rewarding behaviors, such as eating, involves a conflict between the desire to suppress appetite and the inherent motive to consume. This conflict is thought to have costs that carry over into daily life, e.g., triggering negative affect and/or recurring ruminations, which may ultimately impact long term outcome. Hence, increasing research effort is being dedicated to understand the link between emotional and ruminative processes in the etiology and maintenance of AN...

OBJECTIVE: Neuroprosthetics are artificial devices or systems designed to generate, restore or modulate a range of neurally mediated functions. These include sensorimotor, visual, auditory, cognitive affective and volitional functions that have been impaired or lost from congenital anomalies, traumatic brain injury, infection, amputation or neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative disorders. Cochlear implants, visual prosthetics, deep brain stimulation, brain-computer interfaces, brain-to-brain interfaces and hippocampal prosthetics can bypass, replace or compensate for dysfunctional neural circuits, brain injury and limb loss...

BACKGROUND: Following in the vein of studies that concluded that music training resulted in plastic changes in Einstein's cerebral cortex, controlled research has shown that music training (1) enhances central executive attentional processes in working memory, and (2) has also been shown to be of significant therapeutic value in neurological disorders. Within this framework of music training-induced enhancement of central executive attentional processes, the purpose of this article is to argue that: (1) The foundational basis of the central executive begins in infancy as attentional control during the establishment of working memory, (2) In accordance with Akshoomoff, Courchesne and Townsend's and Leggio and Molinari's cerebellar sequence detection and prediction models, the rigors of volitional control demands of music training can enhance voluntary manipulation of information in thought and movement, (3) The music training-enhanced blending of cerebellar internal models in working memory as can be experienced as intuition in scientific discovery (as Einstein often indicated) or, equally, as moments of therapeutic advancement toward goals in the development of voluntary control in neurological disorders, and (4) The blending of internal models as in (3) thus provides a mechanism by which music training enhances central executive processes in working memory that can lead to scientific discovery and improved therapeutic outcomes in neurological disorders...

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: Brown syndrome is an ocular motility disorder characterized by limited volitional and passive elevation of the eye in adduction. Although originally thought due to abnormalities in the trochlea or tendon sheath (limiting the free movement of the tendon through the trochlea), recent evidence suggests that some cases of congenital Brown syndrome may be related to neurodevelopmental abnormalities of the extraocular muscles (congenital cranial dysinnervation disorders, CCDD)...

Uncertainty in diagnosing disorders of consciousness, and specifically in determining whether consciousness has been lost or retained, poses challenging scientific and ethical questions. Recent neuroimaging-based tests for consciousness have cast doubt on the reliability of behavioral criteria in assessing states of consciousness and generate new questions about the assumptions used in formulating coherent diagnostic criteria. The reflex, a foundational diagnostic tool, offers unique insight into these disorders; behaviors produced by unconscious patients are thought to be purely reflexive, whereas those produced by conscious patients can be volitional...

Disadvantageous decision-making and impaired volitional control over actions, thoughts, and emotions are characteristics of a wide range of mental disorders such as addiction, eating disorders, depression, and anxiety disorders and may reflect transdiagnostic core mechanisms and possibly vulnerability factors. Elucidating the underlying neurocognitive mechanisms is a precondition for moving from symptom-based to mechanism-based disorder classifications and ultimately mechanism-targeted interventions. However, despite substantial advances in basic research on decision-making and cognitive control, there are still profound gaps in our current understanding of dysfunctions of these processes in mental disorders...

Research has shown that attention can be abnormally drawn to salient threat- or trauma-related information in individuals with posttraumatic stress and related psychological symptoms. The nature of this attentional bias is thought to derive from capture of attention toward potential threat overpowering the volitional, goal-directed attentional system. However, it is unclear whether this pattern of attentional dysregulation generalizes to salient, but non-emotional types of information. Using a well-established and sensitive measure of attentional capture, the current study demonstrates that posttraumatic psychological symptom severity is associated with the capture of attention by visually salient, non-emotional distractors...