Positive mental health in schizophrenia and healthy comparison groups: relationships with overall health and biomarkers

Abstract

Positive mental health in schizophrenia and healthy comparison groups: relationships with overall health and biomarkers. Objective: Positive psychological factors (PPFs) have been reported to have a significant impact on health in the general population. However, little is known about the relationship of these factors with mental and physical health in schizophrenia. Method: One hundred and thirty-five outpatients with schizophrenia and 127 healthy comparison subjects (HCs), aged 26-65 years, were evaluated with scales of resilience, optimism, happiness, and perceived stress. Measures of mental and physical health were also obtained. Regression analyses examined associations of a PPF composite with health variables. Results: Relative to the HCs, the schizophrenia group had lower levels of PPFs. However, there was considerable heterogeneity, with over one-third of schizophrenia participants having values within the 'normative' range. The PPF composite was positively related to mental and physical health variables and with biomarkers of inflammation and insulin resistance. The relationship between PPFs and mental health was particularly strong for individuals with schizophrenia. Conclusion: A sizable minority of adults with chronic schizophrenia have levels of resilience, optimism, happiness, and perceived stress similar to HCs. Psychosocial interventions to enhance PPFs should be tested in patients with serious mental illnesses, with the goal of improving their mental health (beyond controlling symptoms of psychosis) and their physical health.

Individual differences in level of wisdom are associated with brain activation during a moral decision‐making task

“…Participants recruited for the current study included 41 community‐dwelling adults who were involved in two ongoing studies: the Successful AGing Evaluation (SAGE) study of community‐dwelling adults (Jeste et al, ; Thomas et al, ) and a healthy comparison group from a study of schizophrenia (Edmonds et al, ; Lee et al, ). Cohorts shared the following inclusion and exclusion criteria: (1) community‐dwelling adults, (2) provision of written informed consent to participate in the study, (3) fluency in English, (4) physical and mental abilities to complete the study assessments, (5) no known diagnosis of dementia, and (6) completion of the scale to measure wisdom (SD‐WISE).…”

Positive psychiatry comes of age

“…In addition to their effects on emotional and cognitive health, positive psychosocial factors are closely related to physical health and specific biomarkers of health as well (Edmonds et al , 2018). Empirical evidence supports links between biomarkers and measures of positive psychiatry, including allostatic load, telomere length, inflammation, and genes (Schutte et al , 2016; Wiley et al , 2017), although such research in people with serious mental illnesses has so far been sparse.…”

Overview of measurement-based positive psychiatry

“…Higher levels of happiness and life satisfaction in people with schizophrenia were associated with greater optimism and personal mastery along with lower levels of perceived stress,depression, and amotivation(10, 11). Notably, these positive characteristics were also associated with healthier levels of biomarkers of inflammation and insulin resistance (12).…”