The polysemous concepts of psychomotricity and catatonia: A European multi-consensus perspective.

Current classification systems use the terms "catatonia" and "psychomotor phenomena" as mere a-theoretical descriptors, forgetting about their theoretical embedment. This was the source of misunderstandings among clinicians and researchers of the European collaboration on movement and sensorimotor/psychomotor functioning in schizophrenia and other psychoses or ECSP. Here, we review the different perspectives, their historical roots and highlight discrepancies. In 1844, Wilhelm Griesinger coined the term "psychic-motor" to name the physiological process accounting for volition. While deriving from this idea, the term "psychomotor" actually refers to systems that receive miscellaneous intrapsychic inputs, convert them into coherent behavioral outputs send to the motor systems. More recently, the sensorimotor approach has drawn on neuroscience to redefine the motor signs and symptoms observed in psychoses. In 1874, Karl Kahlbaum conceived catatonia as a brain disease emphasizing its somatic - particularly motor - features. In conceptualizing dementia praecox Emil Kraepelin rephrased catatonic phenomena in purely mental terms, putting aside motor signs which could not be explained in this way. Conversely, the Wernicke-Kleist-Leonhard school pursued Kahlbaum's neuropsychiatric approach and described many new psychomotor signs, e.g. parakinesias, Gegenhalten. They distinguished 8 psychomotor phenotypes of which only 7 are catatonias. These barely overlap with consensus classifications, raising the risk of misunderstanding. Although coming from different traditions, the authors agreed that their differences could be a source of mutual enrichment, but that an important effort of conceptual clarification remained to be made. This narrative review is a first step in this direction.

[Psychiatry]. / Psychiatrie.

The Covid-19 pandemic has a major impact on psychiatry by its social consequences and possible direct effect of certain forms of Covid-19 on mental health. During this crisis, the accessibility of technology meets a state of necessity, which has propelled telepsychiatry from the shadows into the light. The contribution of several technologies (i.e. virtual reality, actigraphy, computational psychiatry) combining clinical data and neuroscience underlines the great neurobehavioural variability even within the same diagnostic category, calling for greater precision in therapeutic offers as suggested e.g. by developments in neurofeedback. The place of intranasal esketamin in the panoply of antidepressent drug treatments for resistant depression has not yet been defined.

La pandémie de Covid-19 bouleverse la psychiatrie par ses conséquences sociales et par de possibles séquelles psychiatriques. La crise actuelle révèle l'accessibilité de technologies digitales telles que la télépsychiatrie. Des technologies comme la réalité virtuelle, l'actigraphie, la psychiatrie computationnelle combinées aux données cliniques et aux neurosciences révèlent une importante variabilité neurocomportementale même au sein d'une catégorie diagnostique donnée, invitant à une plus grande précision des traitements comme suggéré par les recherches en neurofeedback. La place de l'eskétamine intranasale dans la panoplie thérapeutique médicamenteuse de la dépression résistante doit encore être définie.