Background and Aims: Medical professionals faced social, occupational, and financial challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study described these experiences and the perceived effect of quarantine on mental health among physicians in India. Materials and Methods: A descriptive cross-sectional online survey included 558 registered medical practitioners recruited purposively between February and August 2022. A study-specific questionnaire assessed social, occupational and financial experiences and asked, “Did the quarantine period affect your mental health status?” This binary item did not establish the direction or severity of the effect. Results: Overall, 210 of 558 respondents (37.6%) answered yes to the question about a mental health effect of quarantine. The question did not establish whether the effect was adverse or its severity. A drastic reduction in income was reported by 267 participants (47.8%), no change in financial health by 231 (41.4%), and cessation of practice by 60 (10.8%). New insurance purchase for the respondent or a family member was reported by 174 of 558 respondents (31.2%); this is not a percentage of the 162 respondents without personal insurance before the pandemic. Conclusions: The reported social, occupational, and financial experiences support consideration of confidential staff support, safe reporting of public incidents and assistance with work disruption. These are practical priorities for further evaluation, not interventions tested by this survey. The mental health item does not establish deterioration or clinical need.
Background: Evidence on eating disorders (EDs), disordered eating, and weight-related outcomes in sexual-and-gender-minority (SGM) populations varies across subgroups and outcomes. This umbrella review critically synthesized systematic-review evidence. Methods: Searches initially performed in April 2024 were updated and expanded on 15 October 2026 across Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed/MEDLINE, APA PsycINFO, and Embase. Fourteen systematic reviews, including five meta-analyses, met the eligibility criteria. We conducted a structured narrative synthesis, appraised review methodology using the JBI checklist, and assessed primary-publication overlap using corrected covered area (CCA). Results: Among sexual-minority males, especially adolescents and young adults, reviews repeatedly reported elevated disordered-eating behaviors relative to heterosexual counterparts, although direct comparisons between sexual-minority subgroups were limited. Findings for sexual-minority females varied by behavior, age, and sexual-orientation category, whereas higher BMI or overweight/obesity was reported more consistently. In transgender and gender-diverse populations, screening-based estimates suggested substantial probable ED symptom burden but were highly heterogeneous and did not represent clinically confirmed diagnoses. Male sexual-minority weight-related findings did not parallel disordered-eating patterns across the different evidence bases. Overall CCA was 7.52% for ED-related outcomes and 5.30% for weight/BMI, with greater overlap in several subgroup analyses. Conclusions: Disordered-eating and weight-related disparities should be interpreted separately and by subgroup. Observational designs, heterogeneous measures, and overlapping primary publications limit causal, comparative, and clinical inferences.
Background: Multidomain lifestyle interventions have emerged as promising strategies for promoting cognitive health and reducing dementia risk. REDMA (Refreshment Drink for Memory and Attention) is a low-burden, non-pharmacological, multi-ingredient nutritional formulation delivered in the form of a refreshment drink, originally designed for older adults, including individuals with dementia, with the aim of providing mental and emotional support. Objective: To evaluate the feasibility, acceptability, and self-reported perceived cognitive and emotional effects of REDMA among participants of different ages and with different cognitive profiles. Methods: A total of 34 participants were included in the analysis based on a pre-defined engagement-frequency threshold. Older adults, with or without cognitive impairment, were recruited through the Alzheimer Athens. Younger adults were recruited from the Department of Speech and Language Therapy, University of Patras, Greece. Of the 60 initially enrolled participants, 34 (56.7%) met the pre-defined consumption criterion of at least once-daily use for seven consecutive days, including 10 of 30 younger adults (33.3%) and 24 of 30 older adults (80.0%). Results: Among these 34 participants, self-reported acceptability was generally favorable. Participants reported predominantly moderate subjective improvements in cognitive clarity (brain fog), memory, energy, and calmness. Both younger and older adults showed levels of acceptability and satisfaction, with the older ones being more likely to recommend REDMA. Conclusions: These preliminary findings provide information regarding the short-term acceptability of REDMA among participants who met the consumption criteria. However, the substantial proportion of participants who did not meet these criteria, particularly among younger adults, limits conclusions regarding overall feasibility and adherence. Further evaluation in larger, controlled studies is warranted.
Background/Objectives: Automatically estimated affective states are increasingly used to monitor mental health, yet such indices are rarely validated against expert clinical judgement of the same recordings. When an automated index fails to match self-report, the source of the failure is ambiguous: the recordings may not contain the relevant signal, or the model may fail to recover a signal that is present. This exploratory study introduced an independent observer standard to separate these possibilities, and examined how expert ratings, brief personality measures and a multimodally estimated stress index each relate to day-to-day self-reported depressive symptoms in school employees without psychiatric diagnosis or treatment contact. Methods: School employees completed daily assessments comprising a fixed three-turn recorded dialogue with a conversational agent followed by the nine-item Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9). Ten participants with baseline trait data and at least four person-days (153 person-days, median 10.5, range 4–44) formed the primary sample; autistic traits (Autism-Spectrum Quotient, AQ) and personality (Japanese Ten Item Personality Inventory, TIPI-J) were measured once at baseline. Three clinicians independently rated 47 recorded sessions from seven participants on Item 1 (Apparent Sadness) of the Montgomery–Åsberg Depression Rating Scale across facial, acoustic, linguistic and overall channels, yielding 41 person-days with a concurrent PHQ-9 and a valid automated index. The index was produced by LightGBM classifiers over speech, facial and linguistic features, trained on binarised PHQ-9/GAD-7 labels from counselling interviews. Associations were tested with permutation-based Spearman correlations, linear mixed models with within-participant permutation tests and cluster bootstrap intervals, and area under the curve (AUC), with false discovery rate (FDR) correction. Results: In the ten-participant trait sample, neuroticism correlated with mean PHQ-9 (ρ = 0.90, q = 0.019) and agreeableness inversely (ρ = −0.84, q = 0.027); both associations persisted when any one participant was omitted. Associations with symptom variability did not survive adjustment for symptom level, to which variability was tightly coupled (ρ = 0.92). In the seven-participant validation subsample, expert ratings of spoken content were associated with same-day PHQ-9 (b = 3.13, cluster bootstrap 95% CI 1.46 to 3.48, permutation p = 0.013) and the association withstood tests for serial dependence, but it was sensitive to which clinicians’ ratings were included, and averaged ratings reached only moderate reliability (ICC(2,3) 0.49–0.56); facial, vocal and overall ratings were not significantly associated. The automated index showed no association with expert ratings after FDR correction (smallest q = 0.22), showed no demonstrable association with concurrent PHQ-9 (withinperson r = 0.08, 95% CI −0.14 to 0.31) and did not discriminate PHQ-9 ≥ 5 above chance (AUC 0.59, 95% CI 0.44–0.77). Only 13.2% of its variance lay between participants, versus 81.3% for PHQ-9. Conclusions: In this small sample, brief personality measures tracked the level of self-reported depressive symptoms, and expert ratings of spoken content were associated with daily symptoms, although the latter association depended on which clinicians’ ratings were included; concurrent validity of the automated index was not demonstrated against either standard. Inspection of the deployed pipeline indicated output saturation arising from a high-sensitivity operating point. Classifier outputs optimised for case detection should not be repurposed as graded severity indices without recalibration. These hypothesis-generating findings require replication in adequately powered samples.
(1) Background: The objective of this project was to evaluate the relationship between burnout, moral distress, and intent to quit among psychiatric healthcare workers at a safety-net hospital to provide actionable results for leaders and administrators. (2) Methods: This project used a cross-sectional, anonymous survey of burnout, moral distress, and intent to quit. Respondents were healthcare workers (n = 205) of different disciplines in a psychiatry department at a safety-net hospital in the United States. (3) Results: Results showed that 52.7% (n = 108) of healthcare workers reported experiencing burnout, most commonly among technicians and those working in emergency settings. Burnout was associated with both moral distress and intent to quit. The largest driver of moral distress was working with abusive patients and families, followed by compromised care due to lack of resources. (4) Conclusions: Routine monitoring of moral distress may provide leaders with actionable results to address burnout and promote retention of psychiatric healthcare workers.
