Current refugee crisis challenges mental health care systems all over the Europe. There is a number of research describing difficulties in dealing with cross-cultural patients. Access to relevant care as well as its availability are often limited due to: a) lack of respective qualified resources b) linguistically, cultural and even racial barriers in addressing of mental health care needs of cross-cultural patient population. By use of various e-Mental health applications, primarily videoconference, we may improve assessment and/or treatment of refugees and asylum seekers on distance e.g. Arabic speaking psychiatrist located in Sweden would be able to assess and/or treat refugees from Syria located in Germany). Specialized centers for treatment of refugees would also be able to get second-opinion service from remote experts and use it in order to confirm or re-consider diagnosis as well as the treatment options. Establishment of international network of cross-cultural experts enables to:

– Improve the mental health care across national boundaries by providing psychiatric consultations to other countries within EU

– Conduct International Treatment Team with Select Skills (e.g. Sign Language and Many Foreign Languages Staff)

– Provide Distance Supervision and Staff Consultation

– Provide Psycho Education of caregivers

– Improve Distance Learning via Case Conferencing and Best Practice Demonstration Across the National Boundaries

– Create Data Base over cross-cultural and other select skills professionals within EU

This talk will outline the regulatory framework (both mental health and social care) currently in place in Ireland for people with intellectual disability (I.D.) and mental health problems, in the context of the varied nature of available mental health services. As not all aspects of service are currently under the regulatory system, potential ethical issues arise, and will be discussed.

In addition new legislation regarding the support of people with vulnerable decision making capacity will be outlined (Assisted Decision Making (Capacity) Act, 2015); potential ethical issues that are currently arising from this legislation will be explored and discussed.

All different types of abuse can happen to people with intellectual disabilities living in community setting. This can include physical abuse, including the use of restrictive practices, financial abuse by strangers but also by family and carers. They can also be victim to sexual abuse. Neglect is a relatively common concern, which is perhaps more likely in the community compared to institutional settings.

In this presentation we will discuss the fundamental balancing act between paternalism an autonomy that is so often an issue when supporting people with intellectual disabilities in the community, and how to decide where to draw the line in individual cases. We will consider a range of examples to illustrate this, including unlawful deprivation of liberty, people choosing life partners that others regard as unsuitable, why families might restrict access to services, and whether giving people more control over their care through direct payments and individual budgets can lead to financial exploitation.

Finally we will discuss potential solutions to preventing abuse including robust Safeguarding procedures, integrated working between health and social services, a program of Positive Behavioral Support, maximizing communication, promoting access to health and the recognition of mental health problems, how to disseminate training, and the importance of advocacy and regular review.

The stereotypical portrait of an obsessive–compulsive patient is an excessively self-controlled, risk aversive individual that acts in order to avoid potential loss or punishments. Although this portrait fits well with several clinical studies showing increased harm-avoidance in obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD), more recent clinical, neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies challenged this idea and described a different portrait of OCD, showing several commonalities between OCD and addictions such as impulsivity, reward dysfunction and impaired decision-making. The results of these studies conflict with the stereotypical OCD portrait of doubtfulness and risk-aversiveness. In fact, these findings are prototypical for addiction and have led some authors in the last years to view OCD as a behavioral addiction. In our recently published article, we investigated the behavioral addiction model of obsessive (OCD), by assessing three core dimensions of addiction in patients with OCD and healthy participants. Similar to the common findings in addiction, OCD patients demonstrated increased impulsivity, risky decision-making, and biased probabilistic reasoning compared to healthy controls. During the presentation we will discuss the behavioral addiction model of OCD by focusing on common neuropsychological and neurobiological circuitries.

Increasingly patients present themselves to psychiatrists and other care providers with a specific request for treatment of one or more behavioral addictions. From a pathogenic point of view impulsivity and compulsivity are important drivers of these behavioral disorders, and as such may represent a target of pharmacological and broader neurobiological, e.g. Neuro-stimulation, treatment. Although currently treatment as usual has a focus on psychosocial and cognitive behavioral interventions, interest is growing toward the pharmacological interventions. In the presentation a state of the art will be presented regarding the pharmacological treatment of behavioral addictions, with a focus on Gambling Disorder and Gaming Disorder.

A new computerized CPG for Major Depression (e-CPG-MD) was integrated in electronic medical records of primary care in a 7 million population in Catalonia (Spain). An integrated design allows precise access in each patient visit, improving diagnosis, treatment and follow-up. It facilitates an evaluation of suicide risk in depressed patients.

Even in developed countries only a small minority of patients with depression and bipolar disorders receives treatment according to guidelines and the treatment gaps are especially pronounced concerning psychotherapy.

A variety of digital and internet based interventions have been developed mainly building on the principles of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). A quite consistent finding is superiority compared to control groups with largest effect sizes when compared to waiting list controls, however the evidence provided by such studies is questionable. More support for efficacy is provided by studies showing a comparable efficacy compared to face-to-face CBT, however sufficiently powered non-inferiority studies compared to antidepressants or face-to-face therapy are needed. Such studies are necessary for deciding whether digital intervention should be integrated in the health care system mainly as a self-management tool or as an alternative to regular treatment with psychotherapy or pharmacotherapy.

A dynamic new area of research explores the value for self-management and treatment decision of longitudinal data generated by the patient via self-ratings, wearables and other biosensors as well as the pattern of smartphone use. Within the BMBF-funded study STEADY a platform will be developed which allows the individual patient to securely store and integrate these data and to analyze them using analytic tools involving time series analyses. An overview will be given of similar approaches started in the last years within mental health.

Bipolar Disorder is a common and complex mental disorder with a prevalence of 1-2% and accounts as one of the most important causes of disability at age 15-44 years worldwide.

Electronic versions of self-monitoring tools and symptom registration using computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), text messages, and web interfaces have been described in the literature and a large number of commercial Smartphone applications for patients with bipolar disorder are available.

The Next Generation Mobile Platforms for Health, in Mental Disorders project (the NYMPHA-MD project), funded by the European Union's Seventh Framework program for research, technological development and demonstration, focuses on the implementation of a Pre-Commercial Procurement of mobile e-health service for supporting physicians and patients in the treatment of bipolar disorder through continuous patients monitoring in order to dynamically support illness management and potentially identify early warning signs.

The NYMPHA-MD project will define the framework of a Pre-Commercial Procurement for the provisioning of next generation services advocated for mental health treatment with a special focus on bipolar disorder based on the use of new technologies, open standards and open platforms.

The NYMPHA-MD project will focus on identifying requirements involved in the structuring of mental health services with a focus on bipolar disorder treatment including medical, technological, patients, legal, ethical, policy, risk management and business-orientation needs in order to construct a reference model of service provisioning useful in different European contexts.

Schizophrenia and mood disorders -including unipolar depression and bipolar disorder-, are severe mental diseases with a highly heterogeneous symptomatology, among which cognitive dysfunction has progressively emerged as a key cornerstone. Patients suffering from these illnesses show significant deficits in different neurocognitive and social cognition domains. These deficits are evident during acute episodes, and in a high percentage of patients persist in periods of recovery, playing a decisive role on functional and clinical outcome. Nowadays, different pharmacological therapies have been tested, obtaining non-conclusive results. In this context, non-pharmacological strategies, such as neurocognitive remediation, have emerged as promising therapeutic intervention. Neurocognitive remediation comprises a program to rehabilitate cognitively impaired subjects, aiming either to restore their cognitive functioning or to compensate them in specific cognitive domains. One evolving approach, beginning to receive attention for its initial promising results, is computerized cognitive training. This technique employs tasks or games that exercise a particular brain function which target specific neural networks in order to improve cognitive functioning through neuroplasticity in a given neural circuit. In this scenario, we report our recent results with neuropersonaltrainer®-MH; a module for neurocognitive remediation consisting in a computerized telerehabilitation platform that enables cognitive remediation programs to be carried out in an intensive and personalized manner. Our group has applied NPTMH® in a pilot study treating patients with early onset psychotic disorder with positive and promising results, involving an improvement in functionality, neurocognition, and social cognition performance. Furthermore, new trials in bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder have been recently started.

Aims In this lecture I will define and distinguish between shame and guilt. I will then discuss the potential causes of shame and guilt and how these emotions manifest in behavioral and phenomenal terms. I will conclude by introducing a classification that deals with the varieties and nature of the pathologies of shame and guilt that are evident in clinical practice. I will rely on concepts developed by Karl Jaspers, Hans Jonas and Bernhard Schlink. In doing this I will be exploring the role of moral and juridical principles upon the experience of shame and guilt including the place of the imperatives of responsibility upon the experience of shame and guilt. I will argue further that shame and guilt are as important as other secondary emotions such as envy and jealousy but are not as examined and studied in clinical practice. I will make a case for the centrality of these emotions to an understanding of and response to particular clinical conditions in daily practice.

Guilt and shame are important human emotions, which have been studied by several different disciplines. Seminal and recent inputs in Psychology (particularly Psychoanalysis) and Psychiatry are briefly reviewed including cross-cultural considerations and developmental psychology studies on these emotions. Yet this keynote focuses in the phenomenology and epistemology of guilt and shame as complex emotions. This includes considering that guilt is experienced in two moments (decompressed into a moment of negligence and another of guilt) while shame only in one moment (prolonged in a “frozen now”). All the inputs have suggested an operationalization of epistemic and phenomenic differences considering their context, formal object, particular object and action tendency. Lastly it refers to the relation of these experiences with psychopathology and nosology concerning their adaptive and maladaptive nature, their relation with empathy as well as their presence in several disorders such as anxious, depressive and obsessive compulsive sorts.

The Author in this presentation examines the role of two complex human experiences, the Guilt and the Shame, in the field of the substances addiction. The population of abuser can be divided between users of sedatives and users of stimulants. Sedative drugs and stimulant drug belong to two different way of being-in-the-world. Sedative drugs are able to medicate the internal pain, which is constitutive of the guilt. Stimulant drugs are able to medicate the dysphoria, which is constitutive of the shame. In the realm of psychopathology Tellenbach with the concept of premelancholic personality in the guilty man and Kohut with the concept of narcissism in the tragic man have put the bases for a different typification. In both cases, the common final result, from a psychopathological point of view, is a severe crisis of the temporalization.

The growing number of refugees and asylum seekers pouring in Europe due to wars and armed conflicts constitute a great challenge for psychiatry and the mental health field. This challenge also includes the growing racism and discrimination against refugees and asylum seekers. Discrimination could be defined as the attitudes and behavior based on the group differences. Any group acknowledged and proclaimed as ‘the other’ by prevailing zeitgeist and dominant social powers, and further dehumanized may become the subject of discrimination. In a spectrum from dislike and micro-aggression to overt violence towards the other, it exists almost in all societies in varying degrees and forms; all forms involving some practices of exclusion and rejection. Hence, almost all the same specific human physical and psychosocial characteristics that constitute the bases for in-group identities and reference systems could also become the foundations of discrimination towards the humans identified as out-groups. Added to this, othering, rising from imagined and generalized differences and used to distinguish groups of people as separate from the norm reinforces and maintains discrimination.

Recent mass movement of human beings in various parts of the world has brought several challenges. Not only refugees from Syria and Libya to Europe but also refugees, migrants and asylum seekers in Latin America bring specific set of issues with them. It is critical that clinicians are aware of both the vulnerability of individuals to mental ill health as a result of migratory experiences but equally importantly their resilience. The impact on the mental health of those who may be involved directly or indirectly in delivering care along with those new communities who receive these groups need to be taken into account when planning and delivering psychiatric services. It is essential to recognize that experiences of being a refugee or asylum seeker are heterogeneous. Being an asylum seeker carries with it legal definitions and legal imperatives agreed at international levels.

Policymakers and clinicians need to be aware of differential rates of psychiatric disorders in these vulnerable individuals and specific needs related to language, religious values and other cultural factors. Mental health problems may be related to experiencing cultural bereavement where individuals feel that they have lost their cultures, relationships and cultural values. Judicious and careful use of trained culture brokers and mediators should be encouraged as these individuals can inform the team about community needs and inform the community about the team functioning and its principles so that community expectations can be managed appropriately. Such approaches may also help reduce stigma against mental illness.

Bullying is the systematic abuse of power and defined as aggressive behavior or intentional harm doing by peers that is carried out repeatedly, and involves an imbalance of power between the victim and the bully. One in 3 children report having been bullied at some point in their lives, and 10 - 14% experience chronic bullying lasting for more than six months.

Longitudinal research indicates that children who were victims of bullying are at higher risk for common somatic problems, internalizing problems and anxiety or depression disorder, psychotic symptoms and are at highly increased risk to self-harm or think about suicide in adolescence [1]. The mental health problems of victims and bully/victims remain in adulthood. Indeed, we showed that peer bullying in childhood has more adverse effects on diagnosed anxiety and depression disorders than being physically or sexually abused or neglected by parents. Victims also report to have more trouble with making or keeping friends in adulthood and were less likely to live with a partner and have social support. In contrast, bullies had no increased risk for any mental or general health problems, were healthier than their peers, emotionally and physically.

Sadly, many bullied children suffer in silence. To prevent dropping out of school, violence against oneself (e.g. self-harm) and reduce mental and somatic health problems, it is imperative for health practitioners, families and schools to address bullying.