Effectiveness of PTSD telehealth treatment in a VA clinical sample.

Over the past decade, the Veterans Health Administration has supported multiple national rollouts of evidence-based treatments for mental health disorders. Recent studies have shown, however, that the majority of veterans with mental health diagnoses are not utilizing psychotherapy services. In this article, we attempt to address one of the more commonly known barriers to treatment, distance to care. We do this by comparing the effectiveness of outpatient and telehealth cognitive processing therapy (CPT) and prolonged exposure (PE) Therapy for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in a Veteran clinical sample. Multilevel modeling analyses revealed statistically significant differences between the outpatient and telehealth treatments once baseline demographic and symptom severity differences were taken into account. Given that a number of randomized control studies have not found similar outcome differences, future research would benefit from examining whether the outcomes differences in the present study are because of treatment delivery method or sample differences. Veterans completing treatment via outpatient and telehealth delivery methods achieved clinically significant change in PTSD from pre- to posttreatment. These results suggest that delivering evidence-based treatment for PTSD via telehealth may be a viable treatment option for veterans who cannot easily access care because of geographic distance. (PsycINFO Database Record

Neural synchrony indexes disordered perception and cognition in schizophrenia.

Current views of schizophrenia suggest that it results from abnormalities in neural circuitry, but empirical evidence in the millisecond range of neural activity has been difficult to obtain. In pursuit of relevant evidence, we previously demonstrated that schizophrenia is associated with abnormal patterns of stimulus-evoked phaselocking of the electroencephalogram in the gamma band (30-100 Hz). These patterns may reflect impairments in neural assemblies, which have been proposed to use gamma-band oscillations as a mechanism for synchronization. Here, we report the unique finding that, in both healthy controls and schizophrenia patients, visual Gestalt stimuli elicit a gamma-band oscillation that is phase-locked to reaction time and hence may reflect processes leading to conscious perception of the stimuli. However, the frequency of this oscillation is lower in schizophrenics than in healthy individuals. This finding suggests that, although synchronization must occur for perception of the Gestalt, it occurs at a lower frequency because of a reduced capability of neural networks to support high-frequency synchronization in the brain of schizophrenics. Furthermore, the degree of phase locking of this oscillation is correlated with visual hallucinations, thought disorder, and disorganization in the schizophrenia patients. These data provide support for linking dysfunctional neural circuitry and the core symptoms of schizophrenia.