The terms melancholia and mania have their etymologies in classical Greek. Melancholia is derived from ‘melas’ (black) and ‘chole’ (bile), highlighting the term’s origins in pre-Hippocratic humoral theories [ 1 ]. Where depression/melancholia was viewed as an excess of black bile, the humoral perspective saw mania as arising from an excess of yellow bile [ 2 ], or a mixture of excessive black and yellow bile [ 3 ]. The exact origins of the term mania however, are not as clear-cut as those outlined for melancholia. The Roman physician, Caelius Aurelianus, proposes several origins for the word mania, including the Greek word ‘ania’, meaning to produce great mental anguish. He also suggests ‘manos’, meaning relaxed or loose, which would approximate to an excessive relaxing of the mind or soul [ 4 ]. There are at least five other etymological candidates proposed by Aurelianus for the word mania and the confusion surrounding the exact etymology is attributed to its varied usage in the pre-Hippocratic poetry and mythologies [ 4 ].

Music has long been regarded to aid health and loss-adaptation, but effect of music intervention on cancer patients is not well-understood. The aims of this study are to summarize and describe the role of music before and after diagnosis. This review examines music intervention studies with randomized designs for patients with cancer published between 1991 and 2015 from three English- language databases and Chinese-language databases. Ten studies that met specific inclusion criteria were reviewed. Our review indicates that music intervention may have beneficial effects on emotion (anxiety/depression) in patients with cancer. More research is needed to ascertain the most optimal intervention methodology on which cancer populations or which treatment modalities are appropriate for such an intervention.

The aim of this pilot study was to compare psychopathological features and psychological health between women presenting anorexia nervosa (AN) and those presenting obesity (OB). Six AN patients (Body mass index: BMI <15) and six OB patients (BMI >40) completed Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 (MMPI-2), Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20), Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), the Symptom Checklist-90 (SCL-90) and the Eating Disorder Inventory (EDI- 2). These instruments are self-administered questionnaires for adults. The women also provided information on their global functioning (GAF), according to DSM-IV, through a clinical interview. The AN patients expressed significantly more alexithymic symptoms (TAS-20), more psychological symptoms on the EDI-2 sub-scales, and lower global functioning (GAF) than the OB patients. There were no differences in depression rating or general psychopathology as measured by the BDI, SCL- 90 or MMPI-2. The present results depict certain indications that the psychological health of the AN patients was more compromised than it was among the OB patients.

Each year approximately 400 physicians die by suicide in the United States, leaving an estimated one million patients without their physicians [ 1 - 5 ]. Physicians are two to three times more likely to die by suicide than members of the general population and are more likely to die by suicide than other professionals [ 6 , 7 ]. Compounding the tragedy is that for decades we have been aware that medicine is the deadliest profession [ 8 ]. The earliest articles located for this review date to 1897 and 1921 [ 9 ] and the earliest specific data supporting the statement that physicians were at greater risk than other professionals was a 1927 review of 1921 death data [ 10 ]. More physicians in the United States died by suicide than by motor vehicle accidents, plane crashes, drowning, and homicides combined in the late 1960’s [ 11 ] and the statistics could go on. Suffice it to say that the trend remains at best unchanged, and at worst worsening.

Background: Cognitive theories posit that all animal phobics develop a hypervigilance- avoidance attentional pattern when coping with threat. However, empirical research has failed to obtain consistent results. We aimed at addressing this issue by diminishing the methodological flaws that hinder the internal and ecological validity of previous studies.