Mental health-related stigma and attitudes toward patient care among providers of mental health services in a rural Chinese county.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: The increasing prevalence of mental illness and low treatment rate presents a pressing public health issue in China. Pervasive stigma is a significant barrier to mental health recovery and community inclusion. In particular, stigmatizing or supportive attitudes held by healthcare providers could either perpetuate or mitigate self-stigma of people with mental illness. Moreover, mental health resources are unevenly distributed in China, with most of them concentrated in urban centers and provincial capitals. This study explores healthcare providers' attitudes toward mental illness and the challenges they faced at work in a rural Chinese county. METHOD: Four focus groups were conducted with 36 healthcare providers from a three-tier mental healthcare system in a rural county in southwestern China. Focus group discussions were recorded and transcribed verbatim. The team employed a conventional content analysis approach for data analysis. All transcripts were double-coded by three bilingual team members who are native Chinese speakers. Coding discrepancies were resolved by consensus. RESULTS: Healthcare providers recruited from the county, township, and village levels varied in educational background, professional qualification, and experience of working with people with mental illness. Five thematic categories identified across four groups include (1) barriers to mental healthcare delivery, (2) keys to mental health recovery, (3) providers' attitudes toward providing care, (4) providers' perception toward patients and family members, and (5) providers' perception of training needs. CONCLUSIONS: This is a unique study that included healthcare providers from a three-tier healthcare system. Findings signal the importance of understanding healthcare practitioners' experiences and views to inform the design of training initiatives in rural or low-resource communities.

Advanced multimodal imaging in differentiating glioma recurrence from post-radiotherapy changes.

Gliomas are the most common malignant primary brain tumor, and their prognosis is extremely poor. Radiotherapy is an important treatment for glioma patients, but the changes caused by radiotherapy have brought difficulties in clinical image evaluation because differentiating glioma recurrence from post-radiotherapy changes including pseudo-progression (PD) and radiation necrosis (RN) remains a challenge. Therefore, accurate and reliable imaging evaluation is very important for making clinical decisions. In recent years, advanced multimodal imaging techniques have been applied to achieve the goal of better differentiating glioma recurrence from post-radiotherapy changes for minimizing errors associated with interpretation of treatment effects. In this review, we discuss the recent applications of advanced multimodal imaging such as diffusion MRI sequences, amide proton transfer MRI sequences, perfusion MRI sequences, MR spectroscopy and multinuclides PET/CT in the evaluation of post-radiotherapy treatment response in glioma patients and highlight their potential role in differentiating post-radiotherapy changes from glioma recurrence.