Community Mental Health Care Delivery During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Practical Strategies for Improving Care for People with Serious Mental Illness.

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented a formidable challenge to care continuity for community mental health clients with serious mental illness and for providers who have had to quickly pivot the modes of delivering critical services. Despite these challenges, many of the changes implemented during the pandemic can and should be maintained. These include offering a spectrum of options for remote and in-person care, greater integration of behavioral and physical healthcare, prevention of viral exposure, increased collaborative decision-making related to long-acting injectable and clozapine use, modifying safety plans and psychiatric advance directives to include new technologies and broader support systems, leveraging natural supports, and integration of digital health interventions. This paper represents the authors' collaborative attempt to both reflect the changes to clinical practice we have observed in CMHCs across the US during this pandemic and to suggest how these changes can align with best practices identified in the empirical literature.

Community psychiatry tracks for residents: a review of four programs.

Many psychiatry residency graduates end up practicing at least in part in community settings. However, declining funding and other issues prevent many residency programs from offering robust community psychiatry training to all of their residents. Accordingly, some residency programs have developed Community Psychiatry Tracks, with the goal of developing future leaders in public sector psychiatry. We cataloged US psychiatry residency programs offering Community Psychiatry Tracks by reviewing the literature and surveying training directors and members of the American Association of Community Psychiatrists. Authors from each of the four programs found to be actively offering such tracks describe their track curricula, from which we elucidated common and variable elements as well as strengths and weaknesses and then make recommendations for other programs wishing to start a track. A Community Psychiatry Track preliminarily appears to be a well-received way to offer enhanced Community Psychiatry training to interested residents, to recruit medical students to residency programs, to offer opportunities for collaboration between residents and faculty members, and to expand opportunities for scholarly work by residents.

Development and Pilot Testing of a Nurse Care Manager Role in Coordinated Specialty Care for Early Psychosis.

Coordinated specialty care (CSC) improves mental health and functional outcomes among individuals with first-episode psychosis but lacks a standardized approach to addressing chronic disease risk. The authors used community-based participatory intervention mapping with nine CSC teams to implement a nurse care manager role for the team in order to identify and address chronic disease risk factors. The role was piloted at one CSC site to explore its feasibility and acceptability. The nurse care manager role was highly acceptable to clients, team members, and leadership. More than one-quarter of the nurse's time was spent on nonbillable activities, and lack of a clear plan for financial sustainability was the primary barrier to implementation.

The relationship between appraisals of auditory verbal hallucinations and real-time affect and social functioning.

In addition to being a hallmark symptom of schizophrenia-spectrum disorders, auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) are present in a range of psychiatric disorders as well as among individuals who are otherwise healthy. People who experience AVH are heterogeneous, and research has aimed to better understand what characteristics distinguish, among those who experience AVH, those who experience significant disruption and distress from those who do not. The cognitive model of AVH suggests that appraisals of voices determine the extent to which voices cause distress and social dysfunction. Previous work has relied largely on comparisons of "clinical" and "non-clinical" voice hearers, and few studies have been able to provide insight into the moment-to-moment relationships between appraisals and outcomes. The current study examines longitudinal data provided through ecological momentary assessment and passive sensors of 465 individuals who experience cross-diagnostic AVH. Results demonstrated associations of AVH appraisals to negative affect and social functioning. Above and beyond within-individual averages, when a participant reported increased appraisals of their voices as powerful and difficult to control, they were more likely to feel increased negative affect and reduced feelings of safety. AVH power appraisals were also associated with next-day number and duration of phone calls placed, and AVH controllability appraisals were associated with increased time near speech and reduced next-day time away from primary location. These results suggest that appraisals are state-like characteristics linked with day-to-day and moment-to-moment changes in impactful affective and behavioral outcomes; intervention approaches should aim to address these domains in real-time.

Mobile RDoC: Using Smartphones to Understand the Relationship Between Auditory Verbal Hallucinations and Need for Care.

OBJECTIVE: Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) are common in multiple clinical populations but also occur in individuals who are otherwise considered healthy. Adopting the National Institute of Mental Health's Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) framework, the aim of the current study was to integrate a variety of measures to evaluate whether AVH experience varies across clinical and nonclinical individuals. METHODS: A total of 384 people with AVH from 41 US states participated in the study; 295 participants (77%) who received inpatient, outpatient, or combination treatments for AVH and 89 participants (23%) who never received care. Participants used a multi-modal smartphone data collection system to report on their AVH experiences and co-occurring psychological states multiple times daily, over 30 days. In parallel, smartphone sensors recorded their physical activity, geolocation, and calling and texting behavior continuously. RESULTS: The clinical sample experienced AVH more frequently than the nonclinical group and rated their AVH as significantly louder and more powerful. They experienced more co-occurring negative affect and were more socially withdrawn, spending significantly more time at home and significantly less time near other people. Participants with a history of inpatient care also rated their AVH as infused with significantly more negative content. The groups did not differ in their physical activity or use of their smartphones for digital communication. CONCLUSION: Smartphone-assisted remote data collection revealed real-time/real-place phenomenological, affective, and behavioral differences between clinical and nonclinical samples of people who experience AVH. The study provided strong support for the application of RDoC-informed approaches in psychosis research.

Diagnosis and management of bipolar disorder in primary care: a DSM-5 update.

This review discusses the diagnosis and detection of bipolar disorder in the primary care population with recent changes introduced by Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition and the pharmacotherapy and psychosocial management of this psychiatric condition.