UNASSIGNED: In West Africa, healers greatly outnumber trained mental health professionals. People with serious mental illness (SMI) are often seen by healers in \"prayer camps\" where they may also experience human rights abuses. We developed \"M&M,\" an 8-week-long dual-pronged intervention involving (1) a smartphone-delivered toolkit designed to expose healers to brief psychosocial interventions and encourage them to preserve human rights (M-Healer app), and (2) a visiting nurse who provides medications to their patients (Mobile Nurse).
UNASSIGNED: We examined the feasibility, acceptability, safety, and preliminary effectiveness of the M&M intervention in real-world prayer camp settings.
UNASSIGNED: We conducted a single-arm field trial of M&M with people with SMI and healers at a prayer camp in Ghana. Healers were provided smartphones with M-Healer installed and were trained by practice facilitators to use the digital toolkit. In parallel, a study nurse visited their prayer camp to administer medications to their patients. Clinical assessors administered study measures to participants with SMI at pretreatment (baseline), midtreatment (4 weeks) and post treatment (8 weeks).
UNASSIGNED: Seventeen participants were enrolled and most (n=15, 88.3%) were retained. Participants had an average age of 44.3 (SD 13.9) years and 59% (n=10) of them were male. Fourteen (82%) participants had a diagnosis of schizophrenia and 2 (18%) were diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Four healers were trained to use M-Healer. On average, they self-initiated app use 31.9 (SD 28.9) times per week. Healers watched an average of 19.1 (SD 21.2) videos, responded to 1.5 (SD 2.4) prompts, and used the app for 5.3 (SD 2.7) days weekly. Pre-post analyses revealed a significant and clinically meaningful reduction in psychiatric symptom severity (Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale score range 52.3 to 30.9; Brief Symptom Inventory score range 76.4 to 27.9), psychological distress (Talbieh Brief Distress Inventory score range 37.7 to 16.9), shame (Other as Shamer Scale score range 41.9 to 28.5), and stigma (Brief Internalized Stigma of Mental Illness Scale score range 11.8 to 10.3). We recorded a significant reduction in days chained (1.6 to 0.5) and a promising trend for reduction in the days of forced fasting (2.6 to 0.0, P=.06). We did not identify significant pre-post changes in patient-reported working alliance with healers (Working Alliance Inventory), depressive symptom severity (Patient Health Questionnaire-9), quality of life (Lehman Quality of Life Interview for the Mentally Ill), beliefs about medication (Beliefs about Medications Questionnaire-General Harm subscale), or other human rights abuses. No major side effects, health and safety violations, or serious adverse events occurred over the course of the trial.
UNASSIGNED: The M&M intervention proved to be feasible, acceptable, safe, and clinically promising. Preliminary findings suggest that the M-Healer toolkit may have shifted healers\' behaviors at the prayer camp so that they commit fewer human rights abuses.

The main aims of this study were to explore the differences between seven Egyptian clinical and non-clinical samples in death depression, as well as to estimate gender-related differences.
A cross-sectional study.
The Death Depression Scale (DDS) was administered to seven groups (N = 765) of Egyptian normal (non-clinical) patients, anxiety outpatients, schizophrenic inpatients (men and women) and addicts (men only) in individual sessions.
Anxiety outpatients of both sexes obtained significantly and greatly higher death depression scores than did the other five groups, whereas the male schizophrenics, the male addicts, and the male and female non-clinical groups had the lowest death depression scores. Female schizophrenics obtained a significantly higher death depression scores than did male schizophrenics, addicts and non-clinical participants. Female anxiety outpatients and schizophrenics had higher death depression mean scores than did their male counterparts.
The present finding is consistent, in general, with previous studies on death anxiety and death obsession. What applied to death anxiety was consistent also with death depression and death obsession. That is, the death distress concept.

Penile strangulation is a clinical condition requiring emergency management. Several metallic or non-metallic objects can be placed around the penis to improve sexual performance or for auto-erotic purposes. We report the case of two schizophrenic patients aged 25 and 33years hospitalized in the Emergency Department due to penile strangulation by metal ring. The ring was placed at the level of the glans foreskin groove 3 days before in one case and at the level of the root of penis 2 days before in the other. There was no urinary disorder in both patients. Ring ablation was performed with taxis under local anesthesia in one case and under sedation followed by double ring section using an electric saw in the other case.

OBJECTIVE: The present study was designed to assess the role of vitamin-D, in the development of autoimmune thyroid dysfunction in newly diagnosed schizophrenics.
METHODS: For the present study 100 patients and 100 controls were screened out and studied for their thyroid antibodies, GSH, homocysteine, NOS and vitamin D levels by appropriate protocols to assess the underlying mechanism involved in the schizophrenics susceptible to autoimmune thyroid diseases.
RESULTS: The results of the present study depicted that in schizophrenics, levels of cytokines like IL-6 (7.98±0.67 pg/ml), TNF-α, (40.76±6.98 pg/ml), homocysteine (16.98±1.09 µmol/L), Tg-Ab (30.93±3.87 IU/L), TPO-Ab (10.33±1.78 IU/L) and TSHr-Ab (3.76±0.055 IU/L) increased whereas, those of Vit-D (12.76±0.99 pmol/L), NOS (5.99±0.87 IU/L), GSH (4.48±.965 µg/dl) and NO (16.87±3.98 ng/ml) were decreased in the patients as compared to healthy control subjects.
CONCLUSIONS: Vitamin-D in schizophrenia is involved in augmentation of hyperhomocysteinemia, inflammation, oxidative stress and thyroid antibodies, thereby playing a significant role not only in induction of schizophrenic symptoms but may also result in autoimmune thyroid diseases. Thus, earlier detection and rectification of its levels are helpful to limit the miseries of schizophrenia.

BACKGROUND: The simple reaction time task assesses the ability of the subject to respond to an external cue and to retrieve a reward. The reaction time provides an indirect index of the processing capability of the central nervous system and a simple means to the determined sensory and the motor performances, which is a neurobehavioural evaluation. A general slowness in the latency in the reaction time tasks and a disengagement deficit in the visual and the hearing oriented tasks were seen in schizophrenics.
OBJECTIVE: In order to clarify the feature of the attention disorders in schizophrenia, a simple reaction time task was given to schizophrenics.
METHODS: Schizophrenics (34 males and 20 females, n=54) and healthy controls (40 males and 21 females, n=61) with a mean age of 35±7, who were individually matched for gender and age, were included in the study, by using a response analyser to evaluate the reaction time.
METHODS: The performances were expressed in mean ± standard deviation of the reaction time by using the unpaired \'t\' test.
CONCLUSIONS: The schizophrenic patients performed poorer than the healthy controls, which indicated a difficulty in sustaining attention and this was statistically very highly significant (p<0.000). The results suggested that the schizophrenics showed inattentiveness in the clinical settings and an emotional disturbance in interpersonal situations. The increased reaction time as compared to that in healthy controls, might be due to the impairment of the psychomotor poverty, disorganization and reality distortion which were associated with the deficits in the cortical neurological functions, such as planning, coordination and sequencing of the motor acts, which showed a greater involvement of the frontal lobe and temporal lobe dysfunction.