Intimate Partner Violence and Mental Health

Intimate partner violence is highly prevalent globally, which presents worrisome implications for mental health. As explained by the World Health Organization, women who are abused have higher rates of both suicidal ideation and suicide attempts than other women (World Health Organization [WHO], 2011). Our previous research has found that one in six women presenting to an orthopedic trauma clinic...

Intimate partner violence and mental health - Remarks from two Chief Editors on a joint publishing venture

The World Health Organization (WHO) recently estimated that one out of every three women will experience physical or sexual violence by an intimate partner or sexual violence by a non-partner during her lifetime (Abrahams et al., 2014, Devries et al., 2013). Both men and women can be victims as well as perpetrators of IPV, and pregnancy does not prevent it from occurring. Intimate partner...

Intranasal oxytocin as strategy for medication-enhanced psychotherapy of PTSD: salience processing and fear inhibition processes

About ten percent of people experiencing a traumatic event will subsequently develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). PTSD is characterized by an exaggerated fear response which fails to extinguish over time and cannot be inhibited in safe contexts. The neurobiological correlates of PTSD involve enhanced salience processing (i.e. amygdala, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and...

Impaired right inferior frontal gyrus response to contextual cues in male veterans with PTSD during response inhibition

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is often associated with impaired fear inhibition and decreased safety cue processing, however, studies capturing the cognitive aspect of inhibition and contextual cue processing are limited. In this fMRI study, the role of contextual cues in response inhibition was investigated

Injured body, injured soul? Predicting and preventing posttraumatic stress disorder after injury

Traumatic injury is common and may have a major impact on the survivor’s life. In the Netherlands alone, over 7 million injuries are registered yearly, caused by accidents in traffic, at home, at work, or by interpersonal violence. Besides physical recovery, survivors often deal with the psychological impact. Although most are resilient and show a natural psychological recovery within the first...

Harmless Identities: Representations of Racial Consciousness among Three Generations Indo-Europeans

I wish to introduce the topic of racial consciousness with some words about a Dutch author born in the former colony of the Dutch East Indies: Hella S. Haasse. When she passed away in September 2011 at the age of 93, all obituaries affirmed she wasone of the most-respected and admired modern novelists, whose vivid and lively evocations of life in the former colony of the Dutch East Indies have...

Faces, feelings, words: Divergence across channels of emotional responding in complicated grief

Recent evidence suggests that the inability to respond in a context appropriate manner earlier in bereavement is predictive of a protracted grief course with poorer adjustment following the loss (Coifman & Bonanno, 2010). However, little is known about the emotional behavior of adults later in bereavement and whether emotional responding becomes dsyregulated across other channels. An...

Factors Related to Clinician Attitudes Toward Prolonged Exposure Therapy for PTSD

This study examines pretraining attitudes toward prolonged exposure (PE) therapy in a sample of 1,275 mental health clinicians enrolled in a national PE training program sponsored by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Attitudes assessed via survey included values placed on outcomes targeted by PE, outcome expectancies (positive expectancies for patient improvement and negative expectancies...

Feasibility and Acceptability of a Resilience Training Program for Intensive Care Unit Nurses

The critical nursing shortage is particularly apparent in specialty areas such as intensive care units (ICUs). Some nurses develop resilient coping strategies and adapt to stressful work experiences, mitigating the development of common maladaptive psychological symptoms

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