Altered self-experiences arise in certain psychiatric conditions, and may be induced by psychoactive drugs and spiritual/religious practices. Recently, a neuroscience of self-experience has begun to crystallise, drawing upon findings from functional neuroimaging and altered states of consciousness occasioned by psychedelic drugs. This advance may be of great importance for psychiatry.

The co-occurrence of physical and mental ill health means there is considerable overlap between the patients that geriatric medicine and old age psychiatry serve. In this editorial we detail similarities between the specialisms, highlight the common challenges facing them and argue that closer alignment holds the potential to improve patient care.

Michele Tansella, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Verona, died in 2015. This editorial pays tribute to his contributions to scholarship in the field of psychiatric epidemiology and health service research, and to his highly effective efforts to improve mental healthcare, locally, nationally and internationally.

Empirical evidence for the effectiveness of community treatment orders (CTOs) is at best mixed. We examine CTOs through the prism of human rights and discrimination, bearing the evidence in mind, and argue that a necessary condition for their use is that a person lacks decision-making capacity.

Those with mental illness die prematurely. One reason may be that psychiatrists are overly concerned with risk, focusing too much on this aspect of practice and neglecting the physical health needs of our patients. We need to reconsider how we approach our patients and their needs.

Autism and psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia co-occur more frequently than would be expected by chance alone. Exactly why this should be remains unclear, but a better understanding would have important implications for diagnosis, treatment and for biological explanations of both conditions.

People with serious mental illness (SMI) are more likely to engage in health risk behaviours such as unhealthy eating, physical inactivity and smoking. The review by Teasdale et al in this issue shows the potential for nutrition interventions to help people with SMI to manage their weight.

A range of factors can contribute to suicide, which means that a multifactorial approach to suicide prevention is necessary. Whereas randomised controlled trials may be suitable for evaluation of some interventions, others require different approaches for assessment of their impact. Also, suicide itself will not always be the most feasible outcome measure.

Psychiatry uncomfortably spans biological and psychosocial perspectives on mental illness, an idea central to Engel's biopsychosocial paradigm. This paradigm was extremely ambitious, proposing new foundations for clinical practice as well as a non-reductive metaphysics for mental illness. Perhaps given this scope, the approach has failed to engender a clearly identifiable research programme. And yet the view remains influential. We reassess the relevance of the biopsychosocial paradigm for psychiatry, distinguishing a number of ways in which it could be (re)conceived.

We provide three examples of how addiction stigma is sanctioned: (a) discrimination against people with addictions is often legal; (b) public health communications frequently use stigma to promote prevention; (c) some programmes, such as ‘12 steps’ promote self-stigma. The implications of sanctioned stigma for stigma-change programmes are then discussed.

This editorial provides the modern-day context for a long-established psychiatric treatment, democratic therapeutic communities. As this treatment is now such a small field in psychiatry, readers may not have enough background to be able to place the research in a suitable context. This includes the previous gap in experimental research, the difference between the modern model and the one used in the 20th century and the general field of personality disorder evidence.

In this editorial, we discuss Morina and colleagues' meta-analysis of psychological therapies for youth with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression following conflict. Recent years have seen significantly more randomised controlled trial evidence addressing the needs of this population. More work is needed to understand post-traumatic depression, dissemination, timing of intervention and whether trauma-focused interventions are essential.