The Awareness program was designed as a part of the EU-funded Saving and Empowering Young Lives in Europe (SEYLE) intervention study to promote mental health of adolescents in 11 European countries by helping them to develop problem-solving skills and encouraging them to self-recognize the need for help as well as how to help peers in need.

Youth stand at the core of much mental health promotion, yet little is written about their experiences of such efforts. We aimed to take this on by interviewing youth after they participated in Youth Aware of Mental Health (YAM), a universal mental health promotion program. YAM has a non-anticipatory methodology that provides youth with a safe space for reflection, role-play, and discussion. Addressing everyday mental health, YAM invites the experiences and issues relevant to the youth present to influence the program in a slightly different direction every time. The YAM instructor guides the participants but does not present the youth with given formulas on how to solve their problems. Like any mental health promotion, YAM appeals to some more than others in its intended audience and individuals engage with the program in many different ways. We set out to learn more about these experiences. Thirty-two semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15–17 year olds in Estonia, Italy, Romania and Spain. In these interviews, the researchers made an effort to discuss mental health in terms relevant to youth. Still, wide-ranging levels of motivation, ease with engaging in dialogue with mental health professionals, and comfort with the format and content of YAM were detected. The youth were clustered in five different groups relating to their positioning vis-à-vis the researcher during the interview. The following evocative labels were used: “interested”, “foot in the door”, “respect for authority”, “careful”, and “not my topic”. Corresponding labels were devised for their YAM experience: “engaged”, “initially hesitant”, “cautious”, “eager to please”, or “disengaged”. We also observed that the researchers brought their own expectations and employed a variety of approaches that led to anticipating answers, stating the obvious, or getting along better with some of the youth. These modes of interaction were categorized under: “favoritism”, “familiarity”, “frustration”, “out of sync”, and “insecurity”. Similar power dynamics likely transpire in other encounters between youth and researchers, including interventions such as YAM. As mental health professionals, we need to be aware of the professional habits and biases that sometimes obstruct us in understanding the experiences of youth. By initiating dialogue and listening closely to youth we can find a way to those experiences. Qualitative research can help bring the underlying interplay between mental health professionals and youth to the surface while also orienting the conversation towards topics that matter to youth. Some youth are more interested or feel more at ease in speaking openly with mental health professionals, while others find such exchanges less appealing or almost intolerable. Future mental health promotion initiatives would benefit from involving youth in the design of interventions to create an inclusive atmosphere and engage with topics that appeal to youth with diverse experiences of mental health.

The role of gender in posttraumatic cognitions has increasingly been approached. The current study comparatively evaluates posttraumatic cognitions in men and women exposed to specific nonsexual trauma (motor vehicle accidents, work – related accidents, burns). Posttraumatic cognitions and posttraumatic stress symptoms were comparatively assessed in 53 men and 37 women treated in 3 Romanian primary care units after specific accidental trauma. Posttraumatic Cognitions Inventory (PTCI) was used to assess posttraumatic cognitions, and the Short Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Rating Interview (SPRINT) was used to assess posttraumatic stress symptoms. Men with significant posttraumatic stress symptoms endorsed more negative cognitions than women. Men with posttraumatic disability more consistently endorsed some negative cognitions regarding instrumentality, strength and control than their female counterparts. Women and men without posttraumatic disability reported similarly low levels of negative posttraumatic cognitions. Time elapsed since trauma increased most negative cognitions in men. The intensity of PTSD symptoms and presence of posttraumatic disability influence negative cognitions after exposure to accidental trauma. Women experiencing clinically significant PTSD symptoms endorse more cognitions regarding instrumentality, strength and control than male counterparts. Women with permanent disability after trauma report less cognitions involving emotionality, dependence and low self – efficacy than male counterparts. In the absence of permanent posttraumatic disability, men and women endorse similar levels of negative cognitions after accidental trauma. With time elapsed since trauma, men perceive decreasing self – efficacy, problem – solving and emotional control, while women perceive decreasing interpersonal cooperation. Despite limitations (cross-sectional design, lack of normative data for PTCI to ascertain culturally – specific gendered cognitions), this study supports the gender – sensitive approach of accidental trauma, especially when its consequences are pervasive, disabling and increasingly burdensome.

A number of data support the involvement of immunological mechanisms in the etiology of psychiatric disorders. The nervous and immune systems are physiologically integrated and influence each other’s functioning.

Despite the high global prevalence of depressive and anxiety disorders, access to early clinical assessment remains limited for many. Although this field has grown rapidly, existing reviews have focused primarily on technical performance, with limited systematic attention to whether current models meet the prerequisites for clinical implementation. This scoping review mapped methodological approaches across this domain and evaluated clinical readiness using five predefined indicators: sample size adequacy, external validation, prospective data collection, real-world evaluation, and model explainability. Searches of PubMed, Web of Science, and IEEE Xplore (March 2026) identified 2463 records; 34 studies (37 dataset evaluations) were included. The majority of studies (91%) were published from 2022 onwards. Depression was the primary target in 91% of studies, while only one study addressed anxiety. Hand-crafted acoustic features were the most frequent (57%), while classical machine learning was the most common model type (32%). External validation was conducted in only 32% of evaluations and real-world testing in 8%. Clinical readiness was classified as Low in 24%, Moderate in 65%, and High in 11% of evaluations. No evaluation met all five indicators simultaneously. These findings apply primarily to voice-based depression screening; 36 of 37 evaluations targeted depression, and the evidence base for anxiety disorders is limited to a single evaluation, precluding comparable characterisation for that condition. The principal challenges to clinical implementation are insufficient external validation, reliance on laboratory conditions, narrow linguistic coverage, and inconsistent metric reporting. The framework applied in this scoping review provides a replicable structure for assessing the clinical validity of AI-driven psychiatric screening tools.

Depression is one of the most frequent conditions within the general population, ranking among the most burdensome in terms of public health expenses, productivity loss and social costs. The condition has been linked with cognitive deficits that may even continue in remission phases, social cognition being one potentially affected cognitive function. In our study, the Penn’s Emotional Acuity Test included in the CogtestTM battery was used to assess emotion recognition accuracy and processing speed. The Structured Clinical Interview for the Montgomery-Asberg Depression Rating Scale was used to assess the intensity of the symptomatology. A total of 48 depressed individual individuals (65% females), with a mean age of 49.8 ± 10.4 years, and 40 healthy controls (75% females), with a mean age of 35.2 ± 6.9 years were included. As compared to controls, depressive participants recorded significantly less correct answers (9.3 ± 3.8 vs. 11.2 ± 3.6, p = 0.019 – Student’s t test) and slower processing speeds (6795 ± 3366 vs. 4042 ± 1623, p 0.001 – Mann-Whitney U test) in emotion processing. Furthermore, symptom severity significantly influences only processing speed and not accuracy in emotion recognition tasks. Thus, we conclude that depressive individuals have a significant deficit in processing speed and accuracy when identifying the intensity of other peoples’ emotions.