Adjustment disorder is a maladaptive response to a psychosocial stressor. It is classified as a mental disorder. The maladaptive response usually involves otherwise normal emotional and behavioral reactions that manifest more intensely than usual, causing marked distress, preoccupation with the stressor and its consequences, and functional impairment.
Suicide prevention is a collection of efforts to reduce the risk of suicide. Suicide is often preventable, and the efforts to prevent it may occur at the individual, relationship, community, and society level. Suicide is a serious public health problem that can have long-lasting effects on individuals, families, and communities. Preventing suicide requires strategies at all levels of society. This includes prevention and protective strategies for individuals, families, and communities. Suicide can be prevented by learning the warning signs, promoting prevention and resilience, and committing to social change.
Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI), developed by Leslie Morey, is a self-report 344-item personality test that assesses a respondent's personality and psychopathology. Each item is a statement about the respondent that the respondent rates with a 4-point scale. It is used in various contexts, including psychotherapy, crisis/evaluation, forensic, personnel selection, pain/medical, and child custody assessment. The test construction strategy for the PAI was primarily deductive and rational. It shows good convergent validity with other personality tests, such as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory and the Revised NEO Personality Inventory.
Suicide intervention is a direct effort to prevent a person or persons from attempting to take their own life or lives intentionally.
Suicidal ideation, or suicidal thoughts, is the thought process of having ideas, or ruminations about the possibility of ending one's own life. It is not a diagnosis but is a symptom of some mental disorders, use of certain psychoactive drugs, and can also occur in response to adverse life events without the presence of a mental disorder.
Compassion fatigue is an evolving concept in the field of traumatology. The term has been used interchangeably with secondary traumatic stress (STS), which is sometimes simply described as the negative cost of caring. Secondary traumatic stress is the term commonly employed in academic literature, although recent assessments have identified certain distinctions between compassion fatigue and secondary traumatic stress (STS).
Suicide risk assessment is a process of estimating the likelihood for a person to attempt or die by suicide. The goal of a thorough risk assessment is to learn about the circumstances of an individual person with regard to suicide, including warning signs, risk factors, and protective factors. Risk for suicide is re-evaluated throughout the course of care to assess the patient's response to personal situational changes and clinical interventions. Accurate and defensible risk assessment requires a clinician to integrate a clinical judgment with the latest evidence-based practice, although accurate prediction of low base rate events, such as suicide, is inherently difficult and prone to false positives.
Gender dysphoria in children (GD), also known as gender incongruence of childhood, is a formal diagnosis for children who experience significant discontent due to a mismatch between their assigned sex and gender identity. The diagnostic label gender identity disorder in children (GIDC) was used by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) until it was renamed gender dysphoria in children in 2013 with the release of the DSM-5. The diagnosis was renamed to remove the stigma associated with the term disorder.
Patient safety is a discipline that emphasizes safety in health care through the prevention, reduction, reporting and analysis of error and other types of unnecessary harm that often lead to adverse patient events. The frequency and magnitude of avoidable adverse events, often known as patient safety incidents, experienced by patients was not well known until the 1990s, when multiple countries reported significant numbers of patients harmed and killed by medical errors. Recognizing that healthcare errors impact 1 in every 10 patients around the world, the World Health Organization (WHO) calls patient safety an endemic concern. Indeed, patient safety has emerged as a distinct healthcare discipline supported by an immature yet developing scientific framework. There is a significant transdisciplinary body of theoretical and research literature that informs the science of patient safety with mobile health apps being a growing area of research.
The Symptom Checklist-90-R (SCL-90-R) is a relatively brief self-report psychometric instrument (questionnaire) published by the Clinical Assessment division of the Pearson Assessment & Information group. It is designed to evaluate a broad range of psychological problems and symptoms of psychopathology. It is also used in measuring the progress and outcome of psychiatric and psychological treatments or for research purposes.
A suicide crisis, suicidal crisis or potential suicide is a situation in which a person is attempting to kill themselves or is seriously contemplating or planning to do so. It is considered by public safety authorities, medical practice, and emergency services to be a medical emergency, requiring immediate suicide intervention and emergency medical treatment. Suicidal presentations occur when an individual faces an emotional, physical, or social problem they feel they cannot overcome and considers suicide to be a solution. Clinicians usually attempt to re-frame suicidal crises, point out that suicide is not a solution and help the individual identify and solve or tolerate the problems.
A sleep study is a test that records the activity of the body during sleep. There are five main types of sleep studies that use different methods to test for different sleep characteristics and disorders. These include simple sleep studies, polysomnography, multiple sleep latency tests (MSLTs), maintenance of wakefulness tests (MWTs), and home sleep tests (HSTs). In medicine, sleep studies have been useful in identifying and ruling out various sleep disorders. Sleep studies have also been valuable to psychology, in which they have provided insight into brain activity and the other physiological factors of both sleep disorders and normal sleep. This has allowed further research to be done on the relationship between sleep and behavioral and psychological factors.
In statistics, the Newcastle–Ottawa scale is a tool used for assessing the quality of non-randomized studies included in a systematic review and/or meta-analyses. Using the tool, each study is judged on eight items, categorized into three groups: the selection of the study groups; the comparability of the groups; and the ascertainment of either the exposure or outcome of interest for case-control or cohort studies respectively. Stars awarded for each quality item serve as a quick visual assessment. Stars are awarded such that the highest quality studies are awarded up to nine stars. The method was developed as a collaboration between the University of Newcastle, Australia, and the University of Ottawa, Canada, using a Delphi process to define variables for data extraction. The scale was then tested on systematic reviews and further refined. Separate tools were developed for cohort and case–control studies. It has also been adapted for prevalence studies.
Functional medicine is a form of alternative medicine that encompasses a number of unproven and disproven methods and treatments. Its proponents claim that it focuses on the "root causes" of diseases based on interactions between the environment and the gastrointestinal, endocrine, and immune systems to develop "individualized treatment plans." It has been described as pseudoscience, quackery, and at its essence a rebranding of complementary and alternative medicine.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), occupational burnout is a phenomenon resulting from chronic work-related stress, with symptoms characterized by "feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one's job; and reduced professional efficacy". While occupational burnout may influence health and can be a reason for people contacting health services, it is not itself classified by the WHO as a medical condition or mental disorder. WHO additionally states that "Burn-out refers specifically to phenomena in the occupational context and should not be applied to describe experiences in other areas of life."
Vicarious trauma (VT) was a term invented by McCann and Pearlman that is used to describe how working with traumatized clients affects trauma therapists. Previously, the phenomenon was referred to as secondary traumatic stress coined by Dr. Charles Figley. The theory behind vicarious trauma is that the therapist has a profound world change and is permanently altered by the interaction of empathetic bonding with a client. This change is thought to have three conditional requirements: empathic engagement and exposure to graphic and traumatizing material, the therapist being exposed to human cruelty, and reenactment of trauma within the therapy process. This change can produce changes in a therapist's sense of spirituality, worldview, and self-identity.
Suicide among doctors refers to physicians or medical trainees dying by suicide.
The Suicide Behaviors Questionnaire-Revised (SBQ-R) is a psychological self-report questionnaire designed to identify risk factors for suicide in children and adolescents between ages 13 and 18. The four-question test is filled out by the child and takes approximately five minutes to complete. The questionnaire has been found to be reliable and valid in recent studies. One study demonstrated that the SBQ-R had high internal consistency with a sample of university students. However, another body of research, which evaluated some of the most commonly used tools for assessing suicidal thoughts and behaviors in college-aged students, found that the SBQ-R and suicide assessment tools in general have very little overlap between them. One of the greatest strengths of the SBQ-R is that, unlike some other tools commonly used for suicidality assessment, it asks about future anticipation of suicidal thoughts or behaviors as well as past and present ones and includes a question about lifetime suicidal ideation, plans to commit suicide, and actual attempts.
Secondary trauma can be incurred when an individual is exposed to people who have been traumatized themselves, disturbing descriptions of traumatic events by a survivor, or others inflicting cruelty on one another. Symptoms of secondary trauma are similar to those of PTSD. Secondary trauma has been researched in first responders, nurses and physicians, mental health care workers, and children of traumatized parents.
Physician burnout has been classified as a psychological syndrome that can be expressed as a prolonged response to due chronic occupational stressors. In the practice of medicine, it has been known to affect a wide variety of individuals from medical students to practicing physicians; although, its impact reaches far beyond that. Because of the toll taken on the healthcare industry, various treatment and prevention strategies have been developed at individual, team, and organizational levels in hopes to seek the best method of addressing this epidemic.
