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Justice after sexual assault is often understood and enacted through the criminal legal system such that the outcomes are binary (i.e., justice is achieved or not achieved). Previous research indicates that survivors have specific wants and needs following an assault in order to experience justice, which may or may not align with current practices. We conducted a critical interpretive synthesis of 5 databases to create a sampling frame of 4,203 records; the final analysis included 81 articles, book chapters, and policy documents. Results indicate that justice is an individualized and dynamic process which may include the experience of voice, connectedness, participating in a process, accountability, and prevention. The experiences of safety and control are central to each of these domains. Survivors may seek and enact these justice domains through several avenues, including the criminal justice and legal systems, restorative justice, medical/mental health spaces, activism, art, and social media. Existing actors within currently available justice systems, including legal, medical, and mental health personnel should encourage survivors to identify and define their own experience of justice, including locating helpful behaviors rooted in safety and control, and resist a binary model of justice. Extant systems should therefore be flexible and accessible to help survivors realize their preferred modes of justice., Competing Interests: Declaration of Conflicting InterestsThe author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Trauma narratives may have been influenced by the Me Too movement, with thousands of individuals disclosing sexual violence stories online. Youth, the largest demographic of online users, may prefer the anonymity of the Internet to discuss experiences of sexual assault. Understanding the ways that young women, especially those experiencing mental health difficulties, discuss their experiences is important as they are at higher risk of revictimization and continued poor mental health. We searched for terms related to acts of sexual assault on a mental health peer-support app, TalkLife, and compared the number of posts during the initial wave of the Me Too movement (October 2017-March 2018) to the same time period in the previous year (October 2016-March 2017). We found a significant increase in posts related to sexual assault of 49.7% between the Pre and Post Me Too time periods ( p < .001), controlling for a general increase in posts. A content analysis of 700 randomly selected posts found that a substantial number of young women used TalkLife to discuss their experiences of sexual assault, and these self-disclosures were mostly hopeless or depressing in tone. Additionally, neither the nature nor the number of self-disclosures varied across time points. The negative tone of the self-disclosures in the current study is worrying because the way women talk about their trauma can shape how they understand it, which could lead to negative self-appraisal and continued mental health difficulties. Online spaces have the potential to support young women and facilitate help-seeking, but we must be attentive to how they are used.

Background: Postpartum depression (PPD) and postpartum psychosis (PPP) are linked to negative consequences for women and families. Virtual applications present a solution to the challenge of recruiting large samples for genetic PPD/PPP research. This study aimed to evaluate the feasibility of a protocol for enrolling Canadian women with PPD and PPP to a large international psychiatric genetics study using a mobile application (PPD-ACT), and identify clinically distinct subtypes of PPD in the recruited sample., Methods: From April 2017-June 2019, Canadian women provided phenotypic data through the PPD-ACT app. Requests for a genetic sample were made from those with a current or past PPD episode based on an Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS) score > 12 with onset in pregnancy or 0-3 months postpartum, and from those self-reporting lifetime PPP. Latent class analysis (LCA) was used to identify clinically distinct PPD subgroups based on participant responses to the EPDS scale., Results: We identified 797 PPD cases, 404 of whom submitted DNA. There were 109 PPP cases, with 66 submitting DNA. PPD cases (86.7% White, mean 4.7 +/- 7.0 years since their episode) came from across Canadian provinces/territories. LCA identified two PPD classes clinically distinct by symptom severity: [1] moderate-severity (mean EPDS = 18.5+/- 2.5; 8.6% with suicidality), and [2] severe (mean EPDS = 24.5+/- 2.1; 52.8% with suicidality)., Conclusions: A mobile application rapidly collected data from individuals with moderate and severe symptoms of PPD, an advantage for genetics where specificity is optimal, as well as from women with a history of PPP, supporting future work using this approach., (© 2022. The Author(s).)

Background: Individuals experiencing psychosis are at a disproportionate risk for premature disengagement from clinical treatment. Barriers to clinical engagement typically result from funding constraints causing limited access to and flexibility in services. Digital strategies, such as SMS text messaging, offer a low-cost alternative to potentially improve engagement. However, little is known about the efficacy of SMS text messaging in psychosis., Objective: This review aimed to address this gap, providing insights into the relationship between SMS text messaging and clinical engagement in the treatment of psychosis., Methods: Studies examining SMS text messaging as an engagement strategy in the treatment of psychosis were reviewed. Included studies were published from the year 2000 onward in the English language, with no methodological restrictions, and were identified using 3 core databases and gray literature sources., Results: Of the 233 studies extracted, 15 were eligible for inclusion. Most studies demonstrated the positive effects of SMS text messaging on dimensions of engagement such as medication adherence, clinic attendance, and therapeutic alliance. Studies examining the feasibility of SMS text messaging interventions found that they are safe, easy to use, and positively received., Conclusions: Overall, SMS text messaging is a low-cost, practical method of improving engagement in the treatment of psychosis, although efficacy may vary by symptomology and personal characteristics. Cost-effectiveness and safety considerations were not adequately examined in the studies included. Future studies should consider personalizing SMS text messaging interventions and include cost and safety analyses to appraise readiness for implementation., (©Jessica D'Arcey, Joanna Collaton, Nicole Kozloff, Aristotle N Voineskos, Sean A Kidd, George Foussias. Originally published in JMIR Mental Health (http://mental.jmir.org), 02.04.2020.)

High-quality research in clinical psychology often depends on recruiting adequate samples of clinical participants with formally diagnosed difficulties. This challenge is readily met within the context of a large treatment center, but many clinical researchers work in academic settings that do not feature a medical school, hospital connections, or an in-house clinic. This article describes the model we developed at the University of Waterloo Centre for Mental Health Research for identifying and recruiting large samples of people from local communities with diagnosable mental health problems who are willing to participate in research but for whom treatment services are not offered. We compare the diagnostic composition, symptom profile, and demographic characteristics of our participants with treatment-seeking samples recruited from large Canadian and American treatment centers. We conclude that the Anxiety Studies Division model represents a viable and valuable method for recruiting clinical participants from the community for psychopathology research.