Covid-19 and Mental Health: Could Visual Art Exposure Help?

The effects of scar in psychological disorder: A bibliometric analysis from 2003 to 2022

Scars are fibrous tissues that replace normal tissue during the wound healing process. Scarring can lead to low self-esteem, social impairment, depression, anxiety, and other psychiatric and psychological distress, necessitating a comprehensive understanding of the latest perspectives, topical research, and directions in scarring-mental health. This is a biblioshiny and VOSviewer based bibliometric analysis study. All data were obtained from the Web of Science, and a total of 664 articles from 2003 to 2022 met the criteria. The last 7 years have been a period of rapid growth in the field, with 2022 having the highest number of articles. The United States is the core country with the highest production and citation rate. The most cited literature was written in 2003 by Van Loey NE et al. Van Loey NE is the most prolific and influential author in this field. The top five popular keywords include "quality of life", "depression", "management", "anxiety", and "prevalence". The paper concludes that the current focus of scholars in the field is on the treatment of scars and that multidisciplinary treatment of such patients is worth exploring. These findings provide relevant researchers with the current state of research and possible future directions in this field.

Resilience in adolescence during the COVID-19 crisis in Canada

BACKGROUND

The COVID-19 pandemic constitutes a social crisis that will have long-term health consequences for much of the global population, especially for adolescents. Adolescents are triply affected as they: 1) are experiencing its immediate, direct effects, 2) will carry forward health habits they develop now into adulthood, and 3) as future parents, will shape the early life health of the next generation. It is therefore imperative to assess how the pandemic is influencing adolescent wellbeing, identify sources of resilience, and outline strategies for attenuating its negative impacts.

METHODS

We report the results of longitudinal analyses of qualitative data from 28 focus group discussions (FGDs) with 39 Canadian adolescents and of cross-sectional analyses of survey data from 482 Canadian adolescents gathered between September 2020 and August 2021. FGD participants and survey respondents reported on their: socio-demographic characteristics; mental health and wellbeing before and during the pandemic; pre- and during-pandemic health behaviours; experiences living through a crisis; current perceptions of their school, work, social, media, and governmental environments; and ideas about pandemic coping and mutual aid. We plotted themes emerging from FGDs along a pandemic timeline, noting socio-demographic variations. Following assessment for internal reliability and dimension reduction, quantitative health/wellbeing indicators were analyzed as functions of composite socio-demographic, health-behavioural, and health-environmental indicators.

RESULTS

Our mixed methods analyses indicate that adolescents faced considerable mental and physical health challenges due to the pandemic, and were generally in poorer health than expected in non-crisis times. Nevertheless, some participants showed significantly better outcomes than others, specifically those who: got more exercise; slept better; were food secure; had clearer routines; spent more time in nature, deep in-person social relationships, and leisure; and spent less time on social media.

CONCLUSIONS

Support for youth during times of crisis is essential to future population health because adolescence is a period in the life course which shapes the health behaviours, socio-economic capacities, and neurophysiology of these future parents/carers and leaders. Efforts to promote resilience in adolescents should leverage the factors identified above: helping them find structure and senses of purpose through strong social connections, well-supported work and leisure environments, and opportunities to engage with nature.

The future of intensive care: delirium should no longer be an issue

In the ideal intensive care unit (ICU) of the future, all patients are free from delirium, a syndrome of brain dysfunction frequently observed in critical illness and associated with worse ICU-related outcomes and long-term cognitive impairment. Although screening for delirium requires limited time and effort, this devastating disorder remains underestimated during routine ICU care. The COVID-19 pandemic brought a catastrophic reduction in delirium monitoring, prevention, and patient care due to organizational issues, lack of personnel, increased use of benzodiazepines and restricted family visitation. These limitations led to increases in delirium incidence, a situation that should never be repeated. Good sedation practices should be complemented by novel ICU design and connectivity, which will facilitate non-pharmacological sedation, anxiolysis and comfort that can be supplemented by balanced pharmacological interventions when necessary. Improvements in the ICU sound, light control, floor planning, and room arrangement can facilitate a healing environment that minimizes stressors and aids delirium prevention and management. The fundamental prerequisite to realize the delirium-free ICU, is an awake non-sedated, pain-free comfortable patient whose management follows the A to F (A-F) bundle. Moreover, the bundle should be expanded with three additional letters, incorporating humanitarian care: gaining (G) insight into patient needs, delivering holistic care with a 'home-like' (H) environment, and redefining ICU architectural design (I). Above all, the delirium-free world relies upon people, with personal challenges for critical care teams to optimize design, environmental factors, management, time spent with the patient and family and to humanize ICU care.

Evaluation of Expressive Arts Therapy on the Resilience of University Students in COVID-19: A Network Analysis Approach

As an alternative to traditional verbal counselling, expressive arts therapy has been shown to be an effective method of mental health care, particularly when dealing with stressful public interactions, such as those associated with COVID-19. However, few studies have been conducted to determine the efficacy of expressive arts therapy on the resilience of psychologically exposed university students during COVID-19. Furthermore, since network analysis appears to be a popular approach in psychological research, it has not been used in recent intervention studies for resilience. As a result, the current study utilized a network analysis approach to determine the efficacy of expressive arts therapy on the resilience of university students during the COVID-19 pandemic. A total of 263 students in a comprehensive university in China were selected for the therapy group between March and November 2021. In a pre-post design, students’ resilience was assessed using the Resiliency Scale for University Students (RSUS). The extended Bayesian information criteria (EBIC) and graphical LASSO were used to estimate and define paired resilience networks, and the strength, betweenness, and closeness indices were utilized to determine the centrality of the six facets of resilience. Additionally, we verified the stability and accuracy. It was discovered that significant differences appeared between the paired networks before and after expressive arts therapy. Facets of self-efficacy, self-acceptance and problem-solving in resilience were notably improved after the therapy, with the variable of emotional stability sustained at the mean level. Meanwhile, the network analysis has highlighted the central variable of self-efficacy in the pre-intervention and support from friends in the post-intervention. The connectivity among the components of problem solving, support from friends, and support from family was enhanced, with support from friends playing the role of hub nod in the following network. By utilizing a network analytic approach, expressive arts therapy can be more targeted in intervening in resilience mechanisms. As a proxy for efficacious problem-solving, intervention should be calibrated to the cultivation of social support networks, especially in the support from friends.