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Copyright of Canadian Journal of Psychiatry is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper examines the process of psychiatric diagnosis in a community mental health center walk-in clinic. The results indicate a great deal of conflict and contradiction in the psychiatric evaluation. This is discussed in light of several tensions: (1) mixed agendas surrounding diagnosis; (2) conflict between training and professional practice; (3) conflict created when a public facility is staffed by an elite medical school; (4) conflict between providing mental health services while serving the needs of other public agencies and mandates; and (5) conflict between an ascendant biopsychiatric model and the daily work of clinical therapeutic service. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates and describes methods for making psychiatric distinctions. It is by means of psychiatric distinctions that individuals are labeled mentally ill or mentally well. Within the mentally ill category, patients are differentially placed according to the severity and type of their mental illness. The placement of individuals into psychiatric categories is an essential prerequisite not only to the clinical treatment of patients but also to any research where the objective is to determine empirical regularities associated with mental illness. Until the patient is categorized, the practitioner has no logical guide for how to perform treatment or even whether he should treat the patient—i.e, the patient may not be a patient. Similarly, unless the psychiatric researcher has categorized his subjects according to some notion of mental illness he has no way of making comparisons or of assessing change, the two essential processes in research. Thus, the logical first step for arty discovery of new knowledge in the field of mental illness is to appraise the reliability and validity of methods for making psychiatric distinctions. No research findings can be more reliable or valid than the psychiatric distinctions used in carrying oat the research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Ukraine, mental health problems are common yet the mental health services available are still old fashioned and based on healthcare approaches used in the Soviet Union, providing mainly inpatient services and rudimentary community services. The World Health Organization (WHO) introduced the Mental Health Gap Action Programme (mhGAP) to reduce the mental health treatment gap all over the world and 2 years later introduced the WHO mhGAP-Intervention Guide (mhGAP-IG), version 2.0 (2016) as not only an educational tool, but also an evidence based guideline to scale up services for mental, neurological and substance use (MNS) conditions with an objective to reduce gap between available health systems capacity and resources for mental health. The main aim of this paper is to describe reforms of undergraduate psychiatry training in Ukraine using Kyiv Medical University as a case example. Kyiv Medical University (KMU) is the first university in Ukraine to introduce the mhGAP-IG in Ukraine. The revised psychiatry curricula in KMU aims to strengthens the evidence based teaching practices, to put emphasis on community orientated mental health care, and to use interactive teaching methods that the university hopes will attract more future doctors to psychiatry and ideally contribute towards the reduction of the mental health treatment-gap in Ukraine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Canadian Journal of Psychiatry is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

A letter to the editor is presented regarding the mental health services for Acadians in New Brunswick.

The article describes the development of a psychiatric service to the people of Saint Helena, a mid-Atlantic island community. The service addresses the needs of those with mental handicap and severe mental illness. The article examines the psychiatric problems in the community such as mental handicap and schizophrenia. It describes the solutions developed by a medical team without formal training in psychiatry.

The present study reports comparative male-female vulnerability to several stressed life circumstances that have been implicated in the development of depression. My analysis, which draws on data from a 1978 survey of 1,026 adults in central Wisconsin who were administered the Psychiatric Evaluation Research Instrument (PERI) Depression Scale, is based on a structural modeling approach that controls for the confounding of dysphoric mood and other forms of distress with a depressive syndrome. Findings show that women are more likely than men to suffer hardships associated with the absence of a spouse, social isolation, financial difficulties, and chronic health problems. However, none of these hardships has a significantly greater impact on depressive syndrome levels for women than for men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of community mental health as an important system of mental health care delivery has presumably put into practice an ideology that results in what Dinitz and Beran have referred to as "boundary busting." In a previous article (1971), Dinitz and Beran have asserted that community mental health--unlike previously-established systems--has a greatly expanded domain. They conclude that this will erode the boundaries of systems such as traditional mental health and legal systems. This research is an attempt to assess empirically the existence, extent and variations in boundary busting in the role definition of community mental health workers. In a nation-wide sample of community mental health workers, it was found that considerable boundary busting existed from a personal-professional perspective, but was relatively restricted when organizational factors and medical training were taken into account. The analysis suggests both some support for, and some qualification upon, the conclusions of Dinitz and Beran. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study explores socio-cultural and social-psychological factors associated with the voluntary utilization of a psychiatric outpatient clinic among students on a large university campus. Students who sought psychiatric care as compared to those who did not were (1) more likely to come from groups who were less integrated into traditional social institutions in terms of role expectations, (2) more likely to belong to or identify with other students who were more cosmopolitan in value-orientation and less integrated into the general collegiate milieu, and (3) more likely to have friends with social-emotional problems and were more likely to discuss such problems with greater frequency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]